Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

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They're right, at least a third is nonsense slop.

You're also right that some fraction wouldn't be contacting asking for information if the information was more readily available.

They're not shitting on customers and abdicating responsibility for making a better website. They're pointing out something important and unintuitive.

I don't know how to bridge a conversational gap like this because it really is something to experience. Another form of it is job applications. At least 1/3 is just random people.

To try to show some humility beyond "bro u ever done this???":

- My mentally disabled sister, tested at 4th grade level at her peak, and would often spend days applying for random jobs that sounded cool. I'm not talking like "oh Dairy Queen cashier.", I mean, director/CXO etc.

- At my first company, we'd get a contact every 3-6 months, with demo-like questions from the same person. We were small enough that we couldn't chase every lead, made enough money we didn't have to, and I didn't like encouraging active salesmanship. After a couple years, someone followed up asking what his business was like. It was an 11 year old using a point of sale app to get drink orders from his friends from the family pool.

Ooh we had a one of those!

They organised an in-person demo at our office after they filled in the online forms for their "multi-million dollar drinks distribution company", right in our target zone of customer type and size. So we had a few salespeople present to give a swish demo and hopefully win them over.

Turned out to be a 15 year old doing door to door sales of his home made ginger beer. He told us our (half the price of the nearest competitor) product was too expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed in business like he would.

Kudos to our sales guys though: After the initial shock and eye rolling, they treated them like the large business they claimed to be and just used the time to practice their demo/sales techniques.

> He told us our product was too expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed in business like he would.

To be fair, when you're a 15 year old selling homemade drink, everything seems expensive, because you have basically zero costs other than your own time and a sack of sugar and it's difficult to conceive how much money roars around in business with any non-family employee.

I've been working 20-ish years and I still get sticker shock over even quite minor things even though some sap pays me three figures, more than my childhood annual income maybe, a day.

Perhaps it's too much free (as in beer) software and over exposure to ridiculously cheap-through-insane-scale consumer goods - a whole mid-grade phone for the same cost as a meal for two, say. But I think there's also a huge disconnect with how we tell children the world of "good, capitalist work", in which they'll probably spend the rest of their lives, works, and how it really works. About all you really get is Peppa Pig setting up a lemonade stand and learning a lesson on the value of hard work, say, and a jagged line graph briefly mentioned on the news.

The school system, at least for me, was extremely light on that kind of thing, even when you include economics (which I didn't take). In fact even in the media, other then specifically financial things like the FT, how the whole world actual or books in the subject specifically, how everything actually functions at any practical level is just...never really mentioned. Kids might know every kind of dinosaur, the function of the bits on the steam engine, the names of the sails on a ship-of-the-line, but it's almost like everyone has agreed we just don't need to talk about daily reality. It's like a huge "draw the rest of the owl" meme.

Because for most kids the rest of the daily reality will never matter? The only thing relevant to them is how much money appears on their bank account every month.

Of course, it’s not really conceivable they’ll ever need to know the names of the sails of a ship if the line either.

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