Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

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I once knew a guy who was severely spastic, bound to a motorised wheelchair, could barely move or talk, but inside his head he was really smart and good with computers. Despite his complete disability, he was able to land a programming job with a company willing to accommodate for his disability, and he did very good work there.

Then the department where he worked was disbanded and everybody was laid off. All his coworkers got unemployment benefits, but he couldn't, because he was disabled. So he had to get disability instead. So he applied, and was told that this wasn't a new disability, so he had to apply for something for inborn disabilities, which was a slightly different agency. So he did, and was told that that was only for people who have never been able to work, and since he had had a job, it didn't apply to him.

Personally I think everybody who manages to work and make money despite their disability, should just be able to keep everything without losing their disability pay. We should be rewarding them, but instead we're punishing them.

I'm not sure if you or your friend are in the US.

Here we have SSI (for people so disabled they were never able to work) and SSDI for people who could work and became disabled.

I have cerebral palsy and I used to be on SSI. I managed to get a CS degree and get off disability, but in doing so I 'crossed the rubicon' and 'burned the ships' so to speak, on ever going back on disability. It was scary for sure, but it ultimately turned out well. The only way I can imagine being considered 'fully disabled' again is if, god forbid, I was struck with some sort of serious cognitive impairment. I suspect the same holds for your friend.

Cool experience. I always assumed my much less serious problems were too little to get any disability. I worked full time since high school but was not allowed to graduate due to anxiety. I stopped having money by 21 and things lasted that way for over a decade. The only work I did was for a few months.

I would have been screwed and homeless without my parents house for a decade. Luckily that’s not the case any more. I’m doing a tech interview bootcamp hoping to get a solid job and keep it. Don’t have CS degree nor experience for interviews but I would get a basic programing job if I can’t finish the bootcamp. I don’t know what the problem is but whatever it is, it’s crazy.

> I'm not sure if you or your friend are in the US.

We're not. We're in Netherland, but it sounds like the US system is not all that dissimilar from the Dutch one.

Personally I don't think there should be a Rubicon; if you're severely disabled and you still manage to work, I'd like to see that rewarded rather than punished. Keep the disability pay and have something extra. The fact that you then contribute to the tax base is enough for me. There's no need to create extra pitfalls for disabled people.

Yeah, losing disability was scary. When my friends were unemployed in '08, they could turn to trades and other physical work. I didn't have that option. If I failed, I was homeless.

That was pretty much the reason why I kept living like a poor grad student for the next decade until I didn't need to work to survive.

The fundamental problem is that the government is using earnings as the metric for evaluating disability. That might work ok with manual labor, but not so great with non-manual labor jobs.

As others have pointed out, there needs to at least be tapered thresholds with a significant deadband (in dollars and time) so someone can get some career inertia before being cast out of the system. Beyond that, we should be able to provide some help even after someone starts earning. Living and working with a disability is damned expensive, not to mention the horrendous stress of worrying about whether one can meet expectations at work.

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