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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

>She often woke up at 4:30 a.m. to drive from her home in New Jersey, catch a bus into Manhattan, hop on the subway, squeeze in a workout and get to Jefferies’ trading floor by 7:30 a.m. Work dinners ran late into the night, and redeye flights to London were common.

>For Ms. Batchelor, Jefferies’s new policy means coming in to the office three days a week. Although she plans to travel to meetings when necessary, Ms. Batchelor said she was grateful to spend more time with her children and cut back on her long commute. “I didn’t know what I was missing,” she said.

Sometimes I wonder if journalists compete to get the most eye rolling quotes. As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay.

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As if anyone would believe this person was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay.

In my experience working with highly motivated, highly paid people they often aren't particularly self-aware or introspective. In their mind it's not a tradeoff; they usually believe that every job in their industry is like theirs. I suspect this is due to the fact that they've worked long hours and said "Yes" to every request from the beginning of their careers. They genuinely don't understand that things could be different.

This is why so many businesses are struggling with remote working. They honestly don't get that people can work differently.

>they usually believe that every job in their industry is like theirs.

It was, for the woman in the article. But no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages.

And no one forced her to take a break and take conscious perspective of how we live our lives.

This is a common experience: we all take things for granted or assume that things have to be done a certain way, simply because that's the way we've been doing it for so long.

no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages

Changing career later in life is a risky thing to do, especially if you don't have much in the way of transferable skills. Wanting to avoid poverty isn't quite the same as a "desire to earn high wages". People might know they'd happy on low- or mid-level wages but fearful of ending up with no wages. That's a reasonable concern.

People who work in Manhattan and fly often to London aren't in category of ending in poverty, more like having less paid (but still above average) and less stimulating job.

Of course if one has so messed up life priorities that job and life satisfaction coming from it is their #1 concern, way above raising their own kids, then its another of those sad stories later.

People are fearful of many things, usually not in very rational or smart way. One thing about being a proper adult (and a good parent) is to understand which fears are real and address them, and which are just some self-illusions because folks can't get their mind straight and sort out themselves and their lives (for the lack of better words).

> But no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages.

High wages are definitely a factor but being competitive and feeling energized by trades paying off count as well. It's a combination of high reward, betting excitement, and the pleasure of crushing your competition in a context where score is easily kept (in dollars).

If those are the things you enjoy, it's difficult to find all that in other industries.

> I suspect this is due to the fact that they've worked long hours and said "Yes" to every request from the beginning of their careers.

Also, "say yes to and do everything your boss/the police says to you" was ingrained into children for centuries.

The cost of that obedience propaganda, however, never showed up until modern day cutthroat capitalism.

I don't think that's a fair summation: it's really common for people go with what's familiar without critically examining it and both economics and psychology are rife with studies showing how people make decisions less than purely rationally. Some of the most famous examples are related to that quote above: people buy larger houses thinking about the times they'll use extra amenities while ignoring how infrequently they do so or how much time they're spending every day commuting to where they could afford that wish list, or downplaying how much time they spend commuting because they want to think they have a 45 minute commute rather than an hour and are thus “running late” almost every day, etc.

Even very smart people do this kind of thing — I'm thinking of someone I knew who has a math Ph.D. but chronically misjudged their bank account — because they aren't approaching it as a rigorous analytical problem but are just running along on habit, what their peers are doing, and often the stories they tell about how it'll get better once they're further along in their career. If you've been telling yourself that the long hours will get better once you have experience, then that promotion, then at the next job, … it's not hard to just keep doing what you've been doing, especially if you're well paid enough to say it's worth it because you'll retire early.

>>Sometimes I wonder if journalists compete to get the most eye rolling quotes.

They definitely select the most eye-catching/rolling quotes out of an interview, been there, done that, been astonished at the way the article turned out.

That said, however, this is NOT unusual. When I worked at IBM in Manhattan, my manager lived in Poughipse, and woke up at 4:30 every morning to catch the train, slept on the way in, and was in the office before I was, and I lived about 40 blocks away. And he most definitely did NOT make the big banking salary and bonuses.

A lot of people want the suburban quality of life for their kids, and were willing to sacrifice a lot for that. Now, seeing that it is unnecessary, they are pushing back. Which is a damn good thing.

Not that I disagree with the point on journalists behavior, I think while people are to a degree aware of the tradeoffs they are making initially, over time they normalize everything and get basically Stockholm syndromed and peer pressured into their situation.

Early in my career I met a manager type guy in his late 30s that prided himself of only having taken a week of vacation in 4 years and was fully convinced that those kind of things are a pre-requisite of success for everyone. He got a lot more relaxed about life a couple years later after divorce and bankruptcy, having to start many things from scratch.

So I do buy that people can have a revelation about changing lifestyle, even if initially it was a conscious decision to prioritize career over family.

> As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay.

I believe her. Life doesn't have an open enrollment period every year where you're presented multiple career and lifestyle options, and asked to choose one. Instead, one generally converges into a local optimum and breaking out can involve significant energy and risk.

From the perspective of remote work, the pandemic helped a lot of people break out of their local optimum.

Exactly, click bait nonsense. The thing is that before companies could claim "work won't get done if you aren't in the office". Now that that has been proven false, the are grudgingly trying to keep their employees. Remote work is the new carrot just like healthcare was in WWII.

Intentional selection bias and cherry picking is a real problem in media and other domains. Waiting to hear all the pieces you want to hear and then weaving them together to create the story you want in others' voices. It makes things seem more legitimate than they are because it is a set of real data, it just happens to be a heavily manipulated and carefully chosen set.

It sounds innocent at first because you're not creating false data directly, but you are falsifying the representation of the data which is just as bad if not worse.

> As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay.

1.) The tradeoff now is different. It changed.

2.) People used to long commute say pretty much same things when they change job. I realized how much easier my life is when working from home during covid too. I can completely relate to "now realizing how much better it is when I save full hour a day and plus can organize my own day as I wish".

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