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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

> Your social class is written all over your face, your clothes, your manners, your manner of speaking, the company you keep, the hobbies you have, where and how you spend your time...

This is not true for lots of software developers who grew up poor but got rich. I wear shitty clothes, live in the ghetto, my hobbies are video games, cycling, and porn, and when speaking I code-switch easily. If anything, it's the other way around - when I'm around city folks with their mannerisms and discussions about veganism I clearly see I don't fit and I come across as a neanderthal despite my income being around top 10%.

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I grew up with a single dad that while having a good salary also had the mortgage to pay. So I was middle class, but never had the niceties my peers had.

I moved out before finishing school (I did finish living on my own) and working 40 - 60 hours next to school - while being officially below the poverty line. This went on during most of my university days.

When starting a job I had to live frugally, because it had a really shitty salary.

Nowadays I am in the top 5 - 2 percent of earners (depending on how you calculate/count.

I still wear regular clothes most of the time. I nearly never eat out. I spend on things people do not really see.

So yeah - I can relate. Especially when being socially thrown together with the kind of people you describe. 100% second this.

Once I was invited to some gathering. Right at the beginning they asked me if I'm from $ENVIRONEMTNAL_ORGANIZATION. I thought they were just fucking with me so I replied laughing/ironically "Do I look like I'm from $ENVIRONEMNTAL_ORGANIZATION?".

Turns out, they were dead serious. For the rest of the evening we had some boring-ass shitty activities and insufferable conversations. 0/10 I checked out early and never showed up again.

…I'm a bit afraid to ask, but are folks from Greenpeace supposed to be rich or something? (I'm not from the US so idk if it's a cultural thing I'm missing.)

Unless you come from privileged background, you don't exactly have the free time to go and prostest against the destruction of habitat of toads. And even if you do have the time, you probably don't care.

That is a valid point.

Most software related jobs on their own aren't seen as a 'high class' professions. It's a job which got extremely lucrative recently. It's similar to someone who made lots of money from the gold rush. The fact you were poor growing up usually means you'll never be seen as high class at older age either (part of the reason why some of these tech billionaires seem frustrated?)

It's not always too difficult to tell if someone is a software engineer from their behaviour and interests alone.

I think you're describing all the ways that your social class is written all over everything. You could leverage your paycheck to try to change some of this, but your social class influences your decision not to bother.

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