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When you do office work you get the "you're not really working"

When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder"

We never win, and sometimes accepting that is the right decision.

To not be loved is a simple mistake, to not love one another is a fatal mistake.

Wisdom, right here. My position has one foot in the engineering department and one on the factory floor. The engineers think the factory workers are all troglodytes that just have to push buttons, and the factory workers think the engineers don't do anything but sit in front of the computer. Oddly, both believe the other does not have to think because the machine/computer does all the thinking for them, which is so far from the truth.

It all seems to grow from a Seed of Ignorance:; a complete lack of understanding of what someone else's job actually entails, coupled with the subjective measure of how difficult a thing is which is largely based on our own narrow limitations and experiences. It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector.

There are people who find jobs that require very little work, and its probably easier to find these jobs in offices. It works very well with technical work that management do not understand, and where output is difficult measure. its possible that people on HN might know of some jobs that fit this…

There are extreme cases, such as people dying and no one realising that their work is not being done, and that is rare, but a certain amount of slacking off, spending time of social media, etc. is not at all uncommon.

>but a certain amount of slacking off, spending time of social media, etc. is not at all uncommon.

I mean, the statistics support the extraordinary amount of time spent on social media all throughout the day across all generations.

In many Japanese companies entry level engineers were required to work on a factory line for a few months before being assigned their engineering job. This gave them perspective on how their company makes money by manufacturing, and what that activity entails. (this concept, and my knowledge of Japanese companies may be outdated now...)

I wonder if there would be any benefit to allowing each to take a peek into the other's world? I am not sure how it could be done, but some way to allow them to try on the other's role for a day so they can see a full picture of what their co-workers do.

I've worked at companies on both ends of this spectrum, so I can speak to this with some authority.

Company A(CA) had tons of open channels between sales, engineering and machining. Sakes reps had to spend time with the service dept every few months, helping with repairs and what not. One sales guy opted to do it more often because it helped him understand the products better, which helped him sell. Engineering and machining were constantly showing each other different things that could improve production. We barely needed management, leavjng them to focus on administrative crap nobody else wanted to do. It was quite wonderful and remarkably effective. I miss that job, actually.

Company B(CB) did the opposite. All departments, and I mean all had walls between them, both metaphorical and physical. Department heads were the only conduits and they were unreliable at moving info between depts, not to mention reluctant to work with each other. Things constantly had to be reworked, tons of money wasted on parts nobody could use, quality assurance was always an after-thought, etc. The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death. It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.

So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB? Both shops are the same size and offered very similar products and services. Those are just two of my examples, too. I've been with a handful of shops for a long time, and the latter is always a hellscape to work in.

> Company A(CA) [...] was quite wonderful and remarkably effective. I miss that job, actually.

> Company B(CB) did the opposite. [...] The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death.

> So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB?

Murphy's law says Company B. :-(

(Please, please tell us different!)

> It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.

YM AlterCation?

This is a hard business decision to make as it doesn't directly increase revenues and directly reduces productivity.

Might be smart in many instances to do cross training, and on the job perspective expanding, but at the end of the day: it's usually better to let the animous live...and the spice flow.

[flagged]

Somewhat ironically you are underestimating the amount of effort it takes to be as universally reviled as that person. Presumably because you, like most people, have never been in that field.

This is a pretty ignorant attempt at a spicy take.

Before you can even have this conversation, you need to define what "work" is and take into account the stressors of that work, the abilities of the workers, etc. This mentality of "us vs them" when someone wants to ask "who works harder" accomplishes nothing aside from pointing out disgruntled laborers who got suckered into punishing jobs for laughable compensation.

It stems from this a twisted pride, typically from the laborer side of things, that I have seen so many times I've come to just expect it from them. The problem with that stance is that it falls apart with any scrutiny, after the laborer who wants to call someone else out for "not working as hard as they do" realizes that they are being exploited, which is nothing to be prideful about.

It's silly, as was your contribution to this conversation. I recommend reframing it as each position being important to the team, but requiring different demands and skill sets to which different people can contribute. It's not a competition and nobody wins by trying to diminish the contribution of others.

> If most factory workers saw how little some office workers worked

The only morally acceptable form of bigotry in society is against the lazy & stupid.

So if you want to hate, you need to turn everything into one of those two things.

There’s plenty of psychologists that think those are immutable traits (e.g., how disciplined someone is may be related to their genetic disposition for conscientiousness), so I’m not sure about it being a wholly moral argument.

> It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector.

In my experience, it seems to apply to every sector out there. I got started in a different industry than what I'm active in now, and what you describe I have seen across any type of job I've held.

Then there are Excel collar workers who decide what gets build in the first place or what needs to be downsized. People in private equity decide which resource is worthy of keeping or which needs to be let go.

You're exactly right about the seed of ignorance.

I wish there was a good term for it like we have "fundamental attribution error" for that other pernicious cognitive fallacy.

The core mistake is that believing that all we know about something is equivalent to all there is to know about something. So if you don't know anything about welding, you assume it must be brain-dead simple because your knowledge of it is so tiny. If you don't know anything about engineering, you assume it's just pushing buttons.

It's not just about people's jobs, either. It shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.

Dunning-Kruger Effect might be a good term to use.

That's close but a little diffferent. D-K is about assuming your own competence at something you're ignorant in. I think it's caused by the effect I'm talking about, but the root effect is a little broader in that it applies also to how much you assume there is to be known at all by anyone for some field that you're ignorant in.

I'm with ya, yeah, it's almost there. Hmm. I'm not versed enough in cognitive psychology to even guess at what word parts we might throw together to make a new term.

This explains managers perfectly.

Issue is “you should have learned harder” is always from office workers.

Conversely “you’re not really working” comes from blue collar workers.

Both sentences are the same and they are usually used by assholes from one or the other side that either feel attacked or feel superior.

There is no intrinsic value in any of those statements besides what it is saying about person using it - that person is an asshole.

I dont think it is as simple as that. Throwing everyone into the a-hole pool is a rather simplistic approach, and a very dismissive one at that. In particular, the first sentence is often a reply to someone lamenting their situation, while the second sentence is often a statement ment to insult upwards. Context is important.

Why is one of those better than the other?

Seems like amaurose would feel OK with dropping it on someone who is nagging about his current life circumstances while they could learn more.

Even if it is technically true - why would anyone actually say that to someone?

Maybe not assholes, but it is a pretty blatant status play. By denigrating someone else’s work you raise yourself up by comparison. And while a lot of our psychological health is tied to our relative status in society, that doesn’t make it healthy behavior.

Edit: it's also telling from a status standpoint that you characterized the blue collar comment as "insulting upwards." It would probably go a long way to avoiding those types of comments in the first place if people didn't implicitly think blue collar work is "below" white collar work.

What do finance guys think about the other two? They are just moving numbers up and down. Have finance guys ever built anything brick by brick (digital bricks or physical bricks)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9_oWUI7Vo_M

I don’t think people saying these things are inherently wrong. “Not working” is obviously wrong because using brain is work, and it’s exhausting work in many cases. The flip-side, and this is probably what is meant, is that you don’t break your body doing it. Similarly it’s obviously silly to think a higher education is necessary for a good working life. A lot of independent contractors and trades people have some really cool jobs that most office workers would be jealous of. Again what is meant is the perception that not having a higher education leads to a poorer life, which it can, but doesn’t have to.

I think that especially calling white collars out as not doing real work is often lovingly. It can be said by assholes, but the language around physical labour is often “tough love”. I’m not sure calling blue collar workers unfulfilled is very often lovingly though, so I think most people who do that are assholes.

What is interesting in the debate to me, is that I see a lot of IT work as blue collar work. Not all of it, but a lot of what we do is basically trade-skill related similar to how plumbing is. It’s just no physical. Over all though, I think it’s best to spend very little time on people who actually mean it hatefully when they call you X. Who cares what assholes think?

> What is interesting in the debate to me, is that I see a lot of IT work as blue collar work.

Society has loads of edge cases like this.

I broke my arm a few years back, went to hospital, and a surgeon put some titanium plates and screws in. The orthopaedic surgeon spends a lot of the day standing, they repeat similar work every day with minor variations, they can't work remotely, they're exposed to hazardous chemicals, they have face-to-face interactions with customers, they earn money by working rather than from investments or inheritance, they're union members, they get paid overtime, they wear blue employer-issued workwear, many do shift work, and they literally put in screws for a living.

And yet nobody would say surgeons are blue collar workers.

Maybe because of the $500k salaries, or the air-conditioned hospitals they work in, or because their status is equivalent to doctors who are pretty much the definition of upper-middle-class tie-wearing knowledge workers.

> they're union members, they get paid overtime

Very few surgeons are union members. They frequently work for outside groups and are paid per procedure. The ones that do work for the hospital on salary don’t get overtime.

>status is equivalent to doctors

They are doctors. Both in title and in function. Most surgeons only operate a couple days a week. The rest of their time they see patients in clinic, and an outside observer couldn’t tell the difference between their work environment and a primary care physician’s.

You are onto something though. My wife is an ER doctor and her job is very similar to blue collar service jobs (if you consider service jobs blue collar).

She doesn’t make her own schedule. She works insane shifts (one day she could work 7a-4p, the next 10p-7a). She interacts with patients directly all day.

The pay is a lot better, but the hours are worse than any retail job I’ve ever heard of, and you can’t call in sick. Her coworker was sick and could barely get out of bed, but she came in early to have a nurse give her an IV so she could power through her shift—that kind of thing is very common.

Plus you have the ultimate responsibility for every patient that comes through the door. You have to make sure you don’t miss anything serious every time—while at the same time, making sure that you don’t spend too much time with each patient. And the ER you’re working in is full because the floor is too full to admit new patients but the ER can’t just shut the door, so patients are boarding in the halls.

Oh and if you mess up, you can literally lose your house when a jury awards someone more than your malpractice insurance will cover.

They're going to be members of the American Medical Association and likely at least one of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, the American Board of Orthopedic Surgeons, and/or the American Council for Graduate Medical Education. The difference between these organizations and unions pretty much starts and ends with "negotiate collectively with your employer directly" because they all (especially the AMA and ACGME) act to keep salaries and prestige high.

They're not a union member the same way a teacher, police officer, or steam fitter is but they're not as far removed as your typical programmer, for example.

Less than 20% of practicing physicians are members of the AMA.

As for medical specialty boards, getting board certified is much more like an engineer passing the PE exam than joining a union.

Also collective bargaining with your employer is the primary benefit of joining a union, and the primary purpose of joining a union. Without that function a union would be unrecognizable to the average union member.

The American Medical Association, American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, the American Board of Orthopedic Surgeons, and the American Council for Graduate Medical Education are all unions

Powerful unions

None of those are unions. They are lobbying organizations and certification bodies.

The vast majority of doctors aren’t even members of the AMA.

All doctors,like all lawyers, are in a union in the sense that they cannot operate without approval from their peers. It's collusion by labor, but with patient outcomes being the supposed concern rather than pay (though obviously it is also precisely why doctors and lawyers get paid so much).

That’s very different from being in a union though. Without the collective bargaining process unions would be unrecognizable to most members. Doctors either negotiate directly with their employer, or take whatever prices Medicare and insurers will give them.

And currently the AMA’s position is that congress should fund more resident slots which is the limiting factor for the number of doctors.

>precisely why doctors and lawyers get paid so much

I don’t know that regulation is precisely why. It surely contributes, but doesn’t explain all of it.

Carpenters are very rarely regulated, HVAC technicians usually are. The training required is similar. The average salary difference is less than $10k a year.

Doctor’s (and lawyer’s) salaries vary drastically by specialty, and number of doctors in a specialty doesn’t explain all or even most of the pay disparity.

There are far fewer pediatric emergency medical physicians than GI docs, but GI docs make way more money. The extra income has nothing to do with restricted supply, it’s a side effect of the way insurers pay (by procedure and GI does way more procedures).

Using the brain can be especially hard work because you can't let your mind wander. You're giving over more of yourself to the employer.

I've done a lot of blue collar work too and construction and line cooking are not in my experience more conducive to daydreaming than programming is. I assume nearly all workers are fully engaged.

And a roofer can?

>“Not working” is obviously wrong because using brain is work, and it’s exhausting work in many cases.

"Exhausting work," lol.

The only people who say nonsense like this are the people who've never done manual labor for a living. I've done both and there's just no comparison of exhaustion levels.

Is it so hard for you to respond with empathy instead of scorn?

I've also done both and each can leave me profoundly exhausted in very different ways. Neither flavor of exhaustion is worse than the other, just different.

>Is it so hard for you to respond with empathy instead of scorn?

When someone compares programing to manual labor implying that programming is more tiring or at least as tiring, yes, absolutely, 100%, it's incredibly difficult for me to respond with empathy. Impossible, even. It's clear that person has had an incredibly sheltered life.

Thanks for asking? I guess???

Dude.

I live on a horse farm. My day starts and ends with heavy manual labor working around animals that can kill me in an instant if they're in a bad mood or I have the misfortune to get in the middle of a beef between two of them. Most of yesterday, the temperature was in the single digits Fahrenheit with wind gusts to 50mph.

I'm also a programmer. There are some days I couldn't tell you which of the two jobs is the more exhausting.

Its the first one

Indeed! Even though people who've never had to do manual labor for a living will downvote you. It doesn't make it untrue.

You can't please everyone — and even more important: Some people just love to complain for the sake of it. I suspect they put themselves above others that way. "Shit I could sit in that warm office" becomes "You are lazy" or else they have to question their life choices. Vice versa "Shit I could do something less boring" becomes "But I have learned more" for similar reasons. Grass is always greener..

My experience as someone who needs to do both is that often "game recognizes game", so great office workers will appreciate great blue collar workers and vice versa — if given the chance.

Every blue collar worker had situations where they had to wait because some lazy office bum that had to give them paperwork would rather chat with their collegues than do their job.

And every white collar worker had situation where a craftsperson communicated in single word fragments, went off and was seen to smoke cigarettes for half the time only to write them down as work hours while leaving things broken afterwards.

The only thing capable blue/white collar workers hate more than that is uncapable people on their own side.

Do people really think like that? I don't. I'd be ill-suited to most office jobs and most blue-collar jobs. I tend to think "you should have better labor laws, workplace safety, safety net, health care, education..."

If you define "win" as "everyone likes and agrees with me", it is true you will never "win".

I would suggest putting in the time to find a different definition of "win" for your life, rather than accepting it.

"Lot's of people have tough lives, and things like minimum wage can help these people," is something I can potentially get behind. "You're a privileged sitter. Your kind control society yet refuse minimum wage increases, demonstrating a lack of empathy" just alienates me. I struggle to understand this the benefit of this framing outside of in-group virtue signalling.

Frustrated people use frustrated language, sometimes we have to be able to see past that. As someone who used to live below minimum wage, but haven't in a long time, I guess it's easier for me to understand why people get frustrated enough to use emotional language, as it's (seemingly or actually) affecting their daily life at every turn, and they see others around them get richer and richer.

Ironically enough, that you cannot see past the emotional language and describe the quote as "alienating me" also demonstrate an lack of empathy for me, but I guess that's beyond the topic.

Ironically, I don't think it's usually the frustrated minimum wage earners using this holier than thou language. It's generally journalists and academics, and indeed the author is a former journalism professor. When someone struggling to get by does say something that I think is ridiculous like "eat the rich", I keep my judgement at a minimum.

> Ironically enough, that you cannot see past the emotional language and describe the quote as "alienating me" also demonstrate an lack of empathy for me

I wouldn't be surprised if I actually have below-average empathy, but unfortunately for you, people like us still get to vote, and shame isn't a great way to get support on controversial issues. Anyways, your choice in language has real utility, so it's not really a matter of whether or not I'm empathetic. I support welfare as a social safety net, but not welfare solely for the sake of redistribution of wealth. If the political camp that is advocating for welfare is using language that suggests the second purpose of welfare, then I'm less inclined to support them.

The use of "frustrated" language demonstrates no self reflection and recognition of the fact that why someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves and they have a large amount of envy about other people's lives. The takers love to ignore the past and only look at this instant moment and complain about how unfair it is.

Ironically, the people who say "you're selfish and greedy if you don't give me the money you earned" and "you have no empathy" have no empathy or consideration for the people they want to take from.

> The use of "frustrated" language demonstrates no self reflection and recognition

I feel like that extrapolating a lot from someone who just emotionally doesn't feel well.

> the fact that someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves

I don't think you understand how poverty works (in most countries at least). Have you ever lived close to the poverty line and/or earned below minimum wage?

> you're selfish and greedy if you don't give me the money you earned [...] the people they want to take from

No one says this, but at least that you wrote this makes it clear that you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.

>Have you ever lived close to the poverty line and/or earned below minimum wage?

Yes. I grew up in poverty in an area far from any big cities in the '70s and '80s. We only had eggs and meat because we raised chickens and rabbits. Half my calories during the summer months came from the garden.

>No one says this, but at least that you wrote this makes it clear that you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.

I paraphrased. What was actually said was "I hate living in a country where everyone is greedy and don't want to support the poor and homeless."

> you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.

Your comment ended in a way that demonstrated no interest in a good faith discussion. Preemptively telling the people who disagree with you that they have no empathy is a sure-fire way to guarantee that tone of response.

E: Both your comments so far in this subthread are predicated on invalidating the opinions of other because you assert they don't have the right life experiences to know how it is.

> ...why someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves and they have a large amount of envy about other people's lives. The takers...

Tell us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase withnout telling us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase.

Both of kinds of language describe the same reality? The first sounds aspirational, and the second acknowledges where power lies. Maybe you would feel less alienated if you put effort into organizing to raise the minimum wage, for example.

> When you do office work you get the "you're not really working"

> When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder"

Do you really though? I know there's a lingering sentiment from somewhere, but at the same time... I don't recognise this sentiment at all, neither from personal experience nor anecdotal from diverse / random people on the internet in 2024.

In my own experience, I'm the oldest of five and was very much pushed to go to college in a family where my dad, his brothers, and one of my brothers are carpenters. Another of my brothers is a manual machinist. On this side of things, there is a continuous stream of "I can't imagine sitting at a desk all day and dealing with those sorts of people." (because office people are wimps and having less than a yelling, swearing disagreement is unthinkable)

On the other side of things, because I still do a lot of that sort of "trade work" to help out friends since it's my background, I get a lot of "how do you know how to do all this, aren't you glad you went to school and don't have to do this every day, have you tried to convince your family to go back to school?" (and of course, the republicans are bad / dumb undertones, even present in the linked article)

You could be an engineer doing something physical like construction or mechanical engineering? Advanced degree and high pay but you spend plenty of time doing real tangible stuff. Also, there's obvious stuff like surgeons: highly respected and you're doing physical work.

When you are self-employed it's "you couldn't handle a real job"

Yeah, add to that the famous Elon Musk's troll quote, "working from home is unethical, because other people can't all work from home - think about all the people growing your food etc". Yeah, Am I also supposed to feel bad because I work normal working hours and others work at night? What about the people that have to lift heavy objects all day and do back breaking labour, and I "sit or stand at my desk all day". How about those that have a 3h commute while I walked to work from my city center apartment (back when I did work on site).

People will always find something to beat you over the head with. The most important thing is not to let them infect you with their negativity.

The humanitarian tone of your comment clashes nicely with your AynRandish username. ;-)

Humility doesn't hurt anyone.

> think about all the people growing your food etc

Did he really say that? Farmers are the original WFH-ers.

> We never win

You never win everything simultaneously, yes.

Brain work for me is like muscles for others - if I don’t squeeze out every ounce of energy from my brain with problems all day, I feel like I haven’t lived a full day. Many people prefer good workouts instead, if they don’t their body is punitive with restlessness and sleeplessness. Code is my infinite playground but others won’t touch it - despite me trying to convince them for years. They would rather work in the sun, or with other people, or in a busy environment.

People filter themselves into jobs they would rather do, when they have awareness of the possibilities. With social media that awareness is increasing.

I’ve had friends who had the definition of blue collar standing job and chose to transition to nursing, which is another standing job.

Immigration status and lack of language skills may tie you to standing jobs, but if people want to learn and grow out of them, in the US there are pathways. If someone curates a course on career pathways via youtube and spreads them through immigration centers and schools and social programs that will help even more people find their way.

I find healthcare workers to be an interesting mix in this discussion. Their work is extremely physical and mental, and emotionally draining. Demand for it will only go up. Compensation for it will likely go up. Who picks up the jobs will be enlightening. Yes you have the bottleneck for doctor and nurse training, but CNA and PA are not as limited. Doctor liability is an extreme source of stress, but that somehow doesn’t apply to nurses as much, so even doctors recommend their kids become nurses.

> Brain work for me is like muscles for others - if I don’t squeeze out every ounce of energy from my brain with problems all day, I feel like I haven’t lived a full day. Many people prefer good workouts instead, if they don’t their body is punitive with restlessness and sleeplessness.

I need both.

Too little brain work and my thoughts are racing (unproductively) and my sleep needs fall down to ~4h (happens on vacation) which isn’t actually enough to make me feel rested.

Too little physical activity and I’m restless and can’t focus, can’t sleep, and generally stuff falls apart.

I, too, was surprised by this part:

    > Many people prefer good workouts instead

The secret to understanding exercise is knowing that there are both physical and mental benefits.

> I need both.

Definitely. We all do.

Well, to varying amounts. And with varying limitations.

But yeah, it's not a dichotomy.

Physical activity is integral to optimal cognitive function and mental performance. Sedentary lifestyles impair our intellectual capabilities regardless of natural talent or education. Research shows regular exercise enhances memory, focus, creativity, and stress management - all crucial for professional success. Healthcare workers actually demonstrate this mind-body connection well: their physically demanding jobs support rather than detract from the complex mental work they perform.

(obv. I don't know you or your routine, whether you move often by default or are not neurotypical, YMMV)

In case you haven't done that before: I suggest an experiment where you try to have a moderate amount of exercise (w few min in zone 2 cardio) before or during a break at work. Do it for 2-3 weeks and see if there's a difference in your cognitive performance.

I'm saying that not only because:

- there's scientific consensus that lack of exercise negatively impacts our cognitive abilities. Your thought sponge is a part of your body; our minds and bodies are not separate systems. *

- At some point I realised I was used to my default mental state (or performance, so to speak), and never noticed how much better I could feel/think after including more exercise in my life.

* many people would agree that Descartes and mind-body dualism is to blame here, at least partially.

Although I can appreciate your point about having some 'innate' desire for an activity like coding, I think this desire is just one of many factors in choice of work.

My own anecdotal experience is that because of several factors, I had to explore many things before I could figure out that I can actually learn to code, enjoy it, create useful things and be (relatively) good at it. All of this was necessary to actually be able to produce some code for a living.

Here's a list of some of the factors that may affect your desire, aside from some innate interest and intelligence:

- Having access to a computer at an early age and in the formative period

- Parental interest in computing and/or STEM

- Parental understanding of computing and/or STEM (informal tutoring)

- Parental pressure/expectations to pursue computing and/or STEM

- Learning disabilities (ADHD, dyslexia, numeracy)

- Introversion/extraversion

- Visible role models in STEM

- Addictions (gaming, social media, TV)

- Effective teaching of math and computing concepts as a jumping board

- Knowledge of English (given that most programming concepts were defined in English first)

- Early successes and/or rewards in coding/STEM as opposed to non-STEM

- Social valuation of programmers and STEM (i.e., "nerds")

- Parental socioeconomic status

- Number of siblings (e.g., with respect to competition or pressure to leave home early)

- False beliefs ("I'll never be good at math/coding")

- Learning consistency and discipline (i.e., spaced repetition)

- Knowledge of how to learn difficult subjects effectively

- Recognition of fun or social usefulness of coding (with respect to any other pursuit)

- Understanding of implications of choosing particular options (e.g., college prep, career progression) instead of others, at particular stages in life (12-18 years old, with family)

- Familial duties (caring for a parent/sibling, having kids early)

- Sunk cost fallacy (i.e., 3rd year medical school, working vs going back to school)

Again, intelligence and innate desire will play a role, but I think there is nothing genetic about loving to look at some text on a computer. Personally, I met enough intelligent people, STEM and non-STEM, who think they should've just developed a desire for programming because they're burned out, exploited, fatigued and/or underpaid. These aren't implications most could predict when they made significant career choices.

This is an outstanding comprehensive list, how did you come up with it?

> Standers are more likely to be exposed to the outdoors — something that will become more and more dangerous as our planet warms.

Feels almost absurd to see that framed as (just) a bad thing. (I would think Sitters are more likely to be exposed to the indoors, which includes a lack of sunlight and fresh air, possible exposure to mold and bad ventilation, and heated arguments over hot-desking.)

Thought the same. It is clear that this presentation is definetely biased towards showing the problems of standing workers, as there haven't been any negative options about sitting presented.

Unfortunately, while medically known and even legislated (forced breaks), problems of sitting workers are still widely ignored (often by themselves too) until too late or trivialized.

I was getting consistent headaches at work, and attributed it to my coworkers being obnoxious. Then I brought in an air quality monitor, turns out my building had some serious ventilation issues, and there was not clean air at my desk.

This seems like a great demonstration of basing arguments on a dependent variable. Every slide I've seen so far would be better explained by white collar vs blue collar rather than sitter vs stander.

The classic from which all this comes is the UK bus system. You had the driver and the conductor. Equivalent jobs, from an equivalent background, with equivalent lifestyles away from work. But drivers sat and the conductors stood. Very, very different outcomes.

This is literally the example from which we learned that standing and walking around helps prevent heart attacks.

Those jobs seem about as equivalent as driver and passenger. You have to focus and avoid risks all day long as a driver. I'm suprised conductor pays more. I imagine they attract different types of people as well -- customer service people vs video game people. Must have been tough epidemiology to tease a signal out of that.

What makes you think that conductor paid more? Certainly nothing that I said!

Likewise what makes you think that the epidemiology was hard? The statistics were absolutely brutally obvious. The main problem was getting people to look at the data, not interpreting it.

See https://bcmj.org/articles/exercise-and-heart-review-early-st... for some of the early history that is involved here.

They probably just ignore all the confounding variables and focus on what can be measured.

On the other hand IIRC postmen who walk rather than stand are healthy?

It seemed to me that it was using the dependant variable intentionally so that it could build up to the twist: actually it's all about race.

To be fair, the twist did get me. I thought it was leading up to discussing injury rates, or health in old age. Since I'm not from the US, the pivot to discussing race wasn't very interesting/relevant to me.

Ha, I’ve heard a few Dutch say that American style racism didnt really apply to them, but then later they say that some person isn’t Dutch because they aren’t white. All in the workplace.

I think it’s just not as top of mind in other places, but its there.

I think it is a little of both. I’m not American, but as a bystander it seems quite obvious that race is important in the US because of how important slavery has been in your culture (founding fathers, civil war, the history of your political parties, income distribution today, etc).

But I also have the impression that you have more knowledge of racism than some other countries. I mean the Dutch obviously have a horrific racist history.

Its apparent very early on that it is about the US, and everything in the US is all about race.

Race is far more important in the US: it seems to be fundamental to people's identity and how they are regarded in a way that is difficult to grasp from outside. It is strange to me that people who accept self-identity of gender regard race as an immutable inherited characteristic.

The nearest parallel is caste in India. It is inherited, immutable and hierarchical.

The problem is that until 1971, which is within the lifetime of many people currently alive, especially in government (remember, the only US President born after 1946 is Barak Obama), race was a legal category in the US that seriously restricted lives.

Desegregation has been slow, and you can't really desegregate inherited wealth.

Race is in the mix, but is oddly mutable. Back when I was a kid being of Polish ancestry was a kind of joke. Some of my Irish friends have memories of being excluded from social events. At some point we both became "white" and previous divisions faded. There is no comparable we used to be Dalit and then people stopped caring about that experience in India.

The US is not homogeneous and the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.

That at least is my coarse observation as an outsider and I stressed qualifiers as there are no absolutes here, just fuzzy clouds of human attributes with some overlaps and no hard borders.

The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.

> The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types

That's the other side from the one that most strongly regards "race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic" as far as I can see.

> The US is not homogeneous and the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.

Personally I've seen two correlations in different directions.

Race is important to the swastika-tattoo crowd on the far right, no doubt.

Meanwhile on the left, a lot of people acknowledge a widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs that can support a family without a degree. That even though the median family's situation has been improving for decades, a lot of people haven't shared in the benefits. To me this is obviously a matter of class.

But I look at American analysis and discussion, and 95% of the time they ignore class, and instead analyse it through a racial lens - reinterpreting the widening gap between rich and poor as a widening gap between white and black. The along comes Trump, and he gains a load of support from the white working class simply by acknowledging that yes, they are struggling.

So I can certainly see what graemep is getting at.

Blame the likes of Murdoch and his predecessors, they've mastered the art of using rags and tabloids to eliminate nuance in the US public sphere.

Significant US analysis, that with any meat, looks to race, class , and income to quintile the US demographic and examine the prospects of each rank and the mobility across groups.

Recent years have seen books such as Paul Fussell, CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), and a host between.

The difficulty for the US has been the dumbing down of public discourse, that was the condition that permitted a Trump to sweep through on a popularists platform.

I love Isabel Wilkerson's book. It was that (through the comparison with caste) that gave me a clearer idea of the difference between what race is in American culture.

I have posted this before so a bit reluctant to repeat, but its relevant. i wrote a blog post about my view and experience of race in different cultures : https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

> the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.

I'm pretty surprised to hear that. Nearly every program I've seen in my adult life that explicitly uses race as an important factor in who gets hired or promoted or funded has come from the left. The left is also the group that is in favor of gender self-identification. Maybe these aren't always the exact same people, but the overlap politically is strong.

That's not to say that conservatives don't hold or express racist or bigoted beliefs, but I'm not sure I've ever seen an overt effort to only hire white people or exclude brown people.

> the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.

I am not convinced. Even Americans who accept gender self-identity AND claim to be anti-racist usually have a problem with regarding race as a superficial characteristic, and rarely seem to accept people self-identifying as a different race to their "real" one.

> The types of US media that routinely dog whistles race issues and stereotype low IQ gun happy criminal types are pretty much the same media streams that mock trans identity, wokeness, and alphabet classification.

My point is that BOTH sides in the US regard race as an immutable fundamental characteristic.

    > Since I'm not from the US, the pivot to discussing race wasn't very interesting/relevant to me.

In the UK different ethnic minorities do very differently economically (some better than the majority[1]) but this does not follow visible differences.

Indians do a lot better economically than Bangladeshis, black Africans better than black Caribbeans, etc. People from some Eastern European countries do a lot worse than visible minorities. Of the white minorities the Irish were traditionally close to the bottom of the heap historically, but for the last few decades have done well, especially educationally, probably boosted by the quality of Catholic schools (religious schools can receive state funding here and many are therefore free to attend).

Its clearly mostly to do with lack of intergenerational social mobility. Its worth noting that the group doing worst educationally in the UK are white working class boys.

In Sri Lanka which is also my "home" country for a different definition of home the minorities are not "economically lower class" but have faced significant racism and religious discrimination (both sometimes violent) - but have also done the same themselves.

[1] All numbers I know of that compare ethnic groups lump the three biggest native groups into one, "white British".

It's similar in the USA. Black Americans do poorly. Black Nigerian immigrants to great. They're both black so it's evidence race has little to do with whatever the problems of class are but a certain segment of vocal people ignore this evidence.

If true, it’s not necessarily evidence of race being independent of class, it would only be evidence of color being independent of class. If true, it might to some degree be the opposite of what you claim, it might be evidence of race mattering since Americans and Nigerians though they might share some physical traits, are now from different countries for many generations. Is it true? I’d love to see this evidence, can you link to some?

There is a literal mountain of evidence that both color and race in the US correlate negatively with outcomes, perhaps in differing amounts, but if you ignore that, you’re also ignoring some evidence. There a lot of possible confounding reasons why one black group might fare better than another on average in the US, and that means that if you care about being accurate about whether race and class are linked, then it’s extremely difficult to separate them, and nearly impossible to declare they’re not linked. The biggest problem with your claim is that race and class absolutely were linked in the past without question, when blacks were slaves, and we have never had a period in US history where the socioeconomic outcomes of blacks matched whites on average. The situation has improved, but we have plenty of evidence we’re not there yet, and so it’s impossible and almost certainly wrong to claim that either race or color has little to do with class.

A important confounder is that immigrants—especially from somewhere across an ocean—are heavily selection-biased.

I have the thought that racial divisions are even more stark elsewhere, although in cases across different lines. I would, for example expect a lot more Chinese in to positions in that country alongside far lower diversity.

Is it not this way? How about where you are from, since you're "not from the US"?

Most countries have ethnic divisions, but they're not the US race categories and not based on skin colour. I am of my ethnicity and this affected how I was treated, whereas the US flattens that to "white" and treats me as such.

(More baffling is how the US is in complete denial of its class system - so much so that anyone who tries to talk about class is immediately told they're talking about race)

Exactly. Looking from outside, US just paints literal colors over what is really a multitude of ethnicities and cultures and thinks it’s progressive and inclusive. This black, this black, this white, this white, this asian. Awesome reduction.

Looking at it from the inside as a black American, I 100% agree with you. My experience as a black person in the US has been wildly different from someone who grew up in the 'hood or someone living with his nephew in Bel Air :-)

But yet, we're all mushed into the same category and expected to think alike and have the same ambitions. It's frustrating, but there's not a whole lot that I can do about it other than engage with people using my own perspective.

You similarly reduced all Americans to a stereotype with this comment. If you get your idea of Americans from internet discourse, you may come away with this impression, but it's a shallow view of a diverse country.

FWIW: while you are absolutely correct that many activists will replace class discussions with racial assertions, it is not universal here. Many of us are quite aware of and discuss our extreme divides and the mechanisms that keep ratcheting them, perhaps including this redirection habit.

> I have the thought that racial divisions are even more stark elsewhere

While race is of course an issue in all countries, few countries hold on to their racial divide as strongly as the US.

Nonetheless, I didn't mean that discussion about race wasn't relevant or interesting to me. I simply meant that discussion about the racial divides in the US aren't relevant to me.

Since I hear and read about US specific race issues a lot I usually avoid the topic and was a bit annoyed that this post baited me into investing so much time before it revealed what it was about.

Divisions here are between the Irish, British, French, Italians and so on -- each with their own prejudices, to say nothing of people coming from eastern Europe.

Each and every one of these groupings have faced discrimination in one context or another, and all of them would be described as 'white' in American terms. Actual Asian people are too far out of context to really be considered on more than an individual basis; there aren't a lot of them here.

Japanese vs Brazilians

Germans vs Turks

Han Chinese vs non-Han Chinese

Canada vs first nations

Many countries have their racial underclasses.

I agree, it was bit of a bait and switch and (also as a non-American) the racial twist took me by surprise.

The actual data would still have made as much (or more) sense if it was white vs blue collar, but I suppose no one would be surprised by that, and wouldn't have clicked through long enough for the "switch" to hit.

Isn't white vs blue collar a latent variable? You have to operationalize it somehow. If you just ask "how blue collar are you?", people's answers will be influenced by all kinds of subjective biases.

I'd argue sitter vs stander distinction also makes this presentation more visceral, memorable and understandable. Collar color would feel unnecessarily abstract and boring.

When I had a blue collar job, my coworker used to divide jobs into "shower before work" and "shower after work".

It's perhaps less relevant now that a lot of people can roll out of bed and start their remote job in sweatpants, but it's stuck with me.

Ha - my dad, a plumber, couldn't fathom that people would shower in the morning and not of a night. Which, when you spend your day covered in dirt and excrement, makes a ton of sense.

(Despite being solidly white collar, I still shower of a night)

Some cultures, it's normal to shower at night, others in the morning.

The majority of Americans I know shower in the morning. Japanese bath/shower at night as a general rule. A western person I know married to a Japanese person said their partner thought they were gross to climb into bed all dirty (not bathing at night). My friend thought "waking up sticky from sleep and staying sticky all day is gross". My friend's solution was to bath both in the morning and at night. Their partner still only baths at night.

I do both. If I don’t shower in the morning, my pits and other parts smell in ways that will make my clothes smellier faster even with deodorant. And going to bed with a whole day of sweat and body oils on you makes your bedding gross faster (it’s there, even if you weren’t active). I can’t really imagine skipping either aside from occasionally, all my stuff would smell and I’d have to run like 50% more loads of laundry.

You have this backwards - sitting/standing (and autonomy etc.) are the data, and blue-collar/white-collar are names for clusters in that data, and the latter depend on the former. After all, workers choose a shirt according to their job role, not the other way around!

Also more importantly, I think the main point of the article is that it's not just two clusters; there are several interesting axes to look at. E.g. electricians are "standers" but have autonomy; bookkeepers are "white collar" but do little problem-solving, etc.

    > bookkeepers are "white collar" but do little problem-solving

It's not an opinion I hold, it's a data point from the data TFA examined (which was presumably self-reported, so take it up with bookkeepers I guess).

If you want to see it, skip to the "explore" part and then enter "I solve problems daily" and "Bookkeeping" in the UI.

Perhaps you're right. I suppose my annoyance is that by choosing sitting/standing as their variable, they gave the impression that they were telling a new and/or interesting narrative, when really they were presenting something well established and entirely common-sense (physical laborers get paid less and have poorer working conditions than office workers).

I follow you, but I read TFA as saying the complete opposite of that. To me TFA is illustrating that "white-vs-blue-collar" is something of a thought-terminating cliche, and that looking at the actual data shows that various jobs cluster in ways you wouldn't expect if you assumed there were two big white/blue categories.

(Also I interpreted "standing/sitting" as basically being a catchy title - I think the author's premise is that all the axes he examined are relevant, not just the standing/sitting one.)

> bookkeepers are "white collar" but do little problem-solving, etc.

If you think that then I’d wager you’d never had to digitise any form of economic based system. I need an accountant to even begin to tell me how to do their weird nonsensical math, because it’s not actually math but law. Law which is open to interpretation. Law which still has to be boiled down to financial calculations and budget planning.

In Germany you get a green tariff when you produce solar energy. You do this in most of Europe, but in Germany the tariff goes away if you exceed a certain amount of energy production, as in, you’re either paid X or you’re paid 0.

Please see my sibling reply - I don't think it, bookkeepers do (according to TFA's dataset).

I’m not English but is bookkeeper not another word for accountant?

Basically, yes - it's a loose term for those kinds of roles. The specific field in TSA's data is labeled "Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks".

I don't think white collar vs blue collar comparison is necessarily better. There are heaps of ways to slice and dice data and this one of them. I'd argue that it's a rather interesting perspective.

My point is that it isn't really a different slice, though. The vast majority of the "sitting" occupations are white collar; the vast majority of the "standing" ones blue collar.

So think of it as a concise objective way to settle what is blue color from white color, for purposes of a study.

No definition will be perfect, but this one does pretty well as you point out.

It also naturally provides an objective gradation, which many definitions that stand in for blue collar” or sit in for “white collar” won’t provide.

They forgot to mention that the number one cause of death is a disease associated with by a lack of physical activity or prolonged periods of sitting or inactivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...

This is a worthwhile read, but I think it would be better if it offered not just interactive exploration or a video, but a conventional document, too—ideally as the primary form of presentation. This is by the same creator who made the This Is A Teenager exploration.

Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774>

In that presentation, I was happy with how succinctly they were able to get down to what makes environments "high-risk", and I found the classification of "a quiet place to study" as a basic necessity (and its relationship to the prevalence/absence of "chaotic routines") as being particularly striking and memorable:

> Researchers determined risk by asking lots of questions. For example, they asked whether the kid has basic necessities, like electricity or a quiet place to study.

> They also asked about factors that could destabilize the home environment – chaotic routines, parents who have disabilities, or relatives struggling with substance abuse.

(So many environments nowadays, even the ones that are ostensibly created to fulfill this sort of thing, are just total failures at actually providing them. I'm thinking of things like public libraries. I live in Austin and have a major axe to grind about the public libraries here, which are nothing like what you'd get if you were actually interested in the pro-social goals that you'd think a public library would have in its charter. A teenager looking to escape their high-risk environment or an adult who's had their feet knocked out from beneath them basically stands no chance at getting out of their predicament if their only option were to use the public libraries here, which would unfortunately act more like a vortex to ensure they stay in the suck. But this is all beside the point.)

I suspect but cannot prove that there's a similar link to the presentation of information—that the best presentation is simple static media, ideally printed, that is supplemented by these types of exploratory environments so that you can make the main resource come to life. Failing that, you'd want the printed presentation, sans interactivity, and then finally as a last resort, just dumping the person into these kinds of presentations. cf: the widely felt phenomenon of handwritten notes being better than notes typed on a laptop + Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

What specifically is lacking in public libraries in Austin, Texas? Ideally, you can also share a point of comparison, e.g., the libraries in Boca Raton, Florida have much better young adult fiction.

Have you considered a tablet with pen to not cut down so many trees (transflective is the new cool kid on the block i hear, ipad works pretty well ime)? By now i actually prefer its better searchability with ocr and miss pinch to zoom on real paper ;) Or do you think that the paper being wobbly is important? I mean i get missing the indentability. My experience as a student is its more important to move your hands and have an intuitive sense for location on a sheet of paper (more intuitive/faster navigable than with a typed word processor) to easily form deep memories with what you are dealing with (+spaced repetition!!). So in total tablet works great (for me) once you get used to it. :)

Please indulge me on your short tangent on Austins public library, how can they improve? Same budget?

[dead]

There is one other analysis that would, I suspect, adjust the OP’s conclusions: age. Hypothesis: sitters vs standers, and other measures of the quality of the job (danger, flexibility…) correlate substantially with the age of the worker. As you go from your teens to 20s to 30s and beyond you tend on average to get better jobs. It’s not absolute, but I bet it’s a very strong trend, perhaps stronger than racial factors. That’s a hypothesis I wish this analysis examined.

They were too busy making weird barely coherent points like "someday it will be too hot to venture outside" and "America is rich because of black people and the Chinese."

Source? The two claims you listed have some elements of truth behind them, so without seeing the exact claim made, it's impossible to tell whether you're giving an uncharitable summary, or they're actually making absurd claims.

The source is the actual FA dude.

Are you talking about

>Standers are more likely to be exposed to the outdoors—something that will become more and more dangerous as our planet warms.

and

>America got rich selling cotton picked by enslaved Black people. America built the Transcontinental Railroad with Chinese immigrant labor, only to ban Chinese immigration a few decades later. And America feeds itself with animals killed and processed by Black and Hispanic meatpackers.

? If so, I'm not sure how either of those points are "barely coherent", and the characterization made by the gp is a gross misrepresentation of site's claims.

America was built by X. Why doesn't the X's country look like America? >.<

I will always remember that, for my parents' generation, the idea of a "good job" was synonymous with "sitting in an office."

It's true right now in China. A job in an office is a good job. A job not in an office is a bad job. Doesn't matter what you're doing in the office.

You are absolutely right.

Has that changed?

Nowadays it might be 'standing at your home office desk'

Yes, it has changed a bit, but not much.

Nursing assistants are some of the most likely to be injured or ill. Similar to corrections officers and much more so than meat cutters ore tire changers. I found that surprising.

They move heavy, often non-compliant patients. Many with dementia or other diseases that make them dangerous and unpredictable. Deal with bio hazards all day, every day. Work long shifts, often with insane overtime.

Meat cutting might be dealing with sharp objects, but it is also highly repeatable work and designed to be generally acceptable safety. Same goes for tire changing, you are very often using lifts and then you can use proper lifting techniques.

In both jobs the work environment can be designed to be ergonomic enough. Which does not apply to more variable work.

Ill because women have families and are the ones who take a day off when their kids are sick

Additionally, jobs, where the workers have more rights can take more sick days. There’s a culture of not taking a sick day when you’re a construction worker.

Not really surprising. Nursing is a physical job, people are heavy!

Also: exposure to disease, violent patients (especially in psychiatry), slippery floors, sharp instruments, used needles...

Interestingly, I have not noticed lower rates of obesity among the standers compared to sitters. I'm sure we've all seen obese/overweight people in retail, doing road work, or construction , but then also plenty of thin guys who do office work.

When I was having work done on my home, the 4 people who were working on it were all overweight/obese. Bill Gates was wire thin in his '20s despite his job entailing sitting at a computer all day.

I suspect this has to do with metabolic differences (with people with higher IQs having faster metabolisms relative to body mass due to more NEAT or other factors) than just diet and exercise.

Good observation; but I think metabolic differences leading to higher/lower IQs is a stretch (and smells weirdly eugenicist! but that's just my personal opinion).

It seems obvious to me that being poor makes it harder to be healthy. Stand all day and you're too tired to cook or exercise after work. You end up eating calorically dense, ultra processed foods because they're quick to prepare and easy to come by. The stress takes a toll on you physically, but there's no time to see a doctor, and your health insurance sucks. Even if you wanted to exercise, and found a cheap gym, you're more likely to develop something like a repetitive use injury that makes movement painful. And you're probably not getting good sleep, which affects your metabolism as well.

I'd be interested in whether the poverty/obesity correlation holds outside the US or if it's unusually high here. My guess is that it's mostly an American thing.

> I think metabolic differences leading to higher/lower IQs is a stretch (and smells weirdly eugenicist!

I read it the exact other way around: Wasn't GP saying that higher IQ leads to a slimmer body?

(Presumably because the brain is burning more calories; not that I know what "NEAT" means in this context.)

Ohh good point! I admit I also didn't bother to look up NEAT, but looks like non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which aligns with your interpretation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-exercise_activity_thermo...

> I suspect this has to do with metabolic differences

No it has to do with differences in dietary habits.

I think it comes down to junk food is cheap.

It costs a lot to eat healthy short of growing your own stuff.

"A man who sits for something stands for nothing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqjUlmkYr2g

From about:

> Visual storytelling makes ideas more accessible

From an a11y standpoint, that statement is very ironic. Because for visually impaired people, the effect is the opposite of what the sentence claims.

Accessible as in "better to understand", helping with bringing the idea to a more general audience.

A lot of people are uninterested in long texts or in this case parts of the expected audience might also have literacy issues.

Interesting how drivers and healthcare workers are outliers in a lot of metrics. Did anyone else notice other common outliers?

Software Developers were the most obvious outlier in Asian workers and non-citizen workers. It is surprising how much of an outlier it was, even compared to other similar white collar jobs.

If you've spent time in San Francisco or Seattle, it ceases to surprise. I worked for a while on a 120-person project, and we couldn't scape together 10 US citizens to form an on call rotation for a government contract bid...

This is because of John Hughes films and a US bullying culture. Our stem shortage is a choice and directly connected to bullying culture in US schools having ran rampant.

Most other countries, the “nerds” are popular because folks know that they are going to earn big money shortly after. Here? They’re treated like little versions of the United CEO.

And nail techs!

Yeah it's impressive how far it is on that graph. It seems like they tend to be on the left end of the main sequence for most plots.

Do they include burnout and depression as injuries?

Reminds me of:

> Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

> They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.

https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

I did a year of landscaping and did 6ish years at grocery stores. Those jobs are 100% less stress and much more enjoyable imo. If they paid the same I would switch in a heartbeat.

When you get to the Senior+ level in software, the buck often stops with you, and if you can't figure something out it can be a big ego hit. I never woke up or went to sleep wondering if I would be able to do landscaping or stock shelves the next day, but I often fall asleep stressed about how to architect something at work.

Ownership of problems is worth a lot of money, thats why CEOs get paid so much. In most other jobs you can blame a chain of managers and processes, but with engineering if you fail the blame falls straight on you.

> Ownership of problems is worth a lot of money, thats why CEOs get paid so much.

But CEOs don't seem to "own" any problems, do they? However bad they fuck up, they still get to sail away into the sunset on their "golden parachute" separation deal.

The reason they don't is they have a narrative they want to push. The entire thing is deeply flawed, from sitting vs standing when in fact it's white vs blue collar. There's plenty of sitting blue collar jobs that are brutal. Then not differentiating qualified vs unqualified blue collar work. These days qualified blue collar has similar pay to white collar and arguably more job security. But in the end there's no point digging to deep, it's just another race bait.

Quote: "America got rich selling cotton picked by enslaved Black people"

I stopped there. I am here to read news about tech, not propaganda lies. Also flagged this.

What caught me out was the random argument that undocumented (see: illegal) immigrants should receive social security benefits. By the very definition of how documentation works this would be impossible, so I’m assuming the author is advocating for extending citizenship en-masse.

Yet until 1996, any worker who payed into social security (which includes many undocumented immigrants) was entitled to its benefits. The source the author linked makes this clear.

> When the Social Security program began paying benefits in 1940, there were no restrictions on benefit payments to noncitizens.

> In 1996, Congress approved tighter restrictions on the payment of Social Security benefits to aliens residing in the United States. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA)23 prohibited the payment of Social Security benefits to aliens in the United States who are not lawfully present, unless nonpayment would be contrary to a totalization agreement or Section 202(t) of the Social Security Act (the alien nonpayment provision).24 This provision became effective for applications filed on or after September 1, 1996. Subsequently, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 199625 added Section 202(y) to the Social Security Act. Section 202(y) of the act, which became effective for applications filed on or after December 1, 1996, states, "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no monthly benefit under [Title II of the Social Security Act] shall be payable to any alien in the United States for any month during which such alien is not lawfully present in the United States as determined by the Attorney General."

https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20161117_RL32004_1ac9e9...

Also, many (maybe all?) documented non-citizen immigrants are eligible for social security if they meet the other criteria, so there's no reason to assume the author is arguing "for extending citizenship en-masse". Nor even that they are arguing for more visas being granted at all

Keep in mind that "undocumented" is a term-of-art. They may in practice be extremely well documented, in every regard except for an active visa.

A significant portion of "illegal" immigration is folks who have overstayed a legitimate work visa (and hence obtained a social security number during the visa application process), and there's also the whole bucket of folks who applied for a social security card under the DACA (which protections have since been mostly rescinded).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration#Terminolog... "undocumented" is a euphemism since "illegal immigrant" sounds like the person is illegal (vs having done an illegal action), but it has the unfortunate effect of leading to exactly this kind of confusion.

So-called "undocumented immigrants" can be quite well documented and even pay social security taxes: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/01/28/undocumented-immigran...

It's not random when you consider the clear motives behind this visualization.

The south literally tried to secede over exactly that state of affairs, starting the USA civil war. Not particularly controversial...

The issue is that only the south got rich. Not "America".

The north got rich off factories and wage earning labour. To equate the wealth of America to the south is a falsehood. And not a helpful one. It misleads you into missing the travesty of slavery: it did not build a nation. It gave leisure to a couple lucky families at the expense of hundreds per plantation.

The industry and wage earning of the north is what built America.

So the South produced cheap goods… where did they go? Who benefitted from being able to buy underpriced agricultural products?

Predominately England though France did benefit some as well.

Well yes, because the South supplied the majority of the world’s cotton, and the European powers were larger economies at the time.

But the textile mills in the Northern states also got their cotton predominantly from the South. Not to mention the tobacco, rice, etc.

> The industry and wage earning of the north is what built America.

uhhh... who is gonna tell him? that those industries in the north imported goods from the south.

The white liberal has been attacked way too hard throughout history despite literally being the good guy of history for hundreds of years. I’m so glad to see us finally defending our heritage. John Brown was a white liberal and a lot of black people cite him as “the realist white man who ever lived”.

Americas racism was primarily southerners being racist. It took white liberals to liberate everyone else, and we have to thank and celebrate the white liberal, not shit on them yet again.

You missed my point. US was not rich due to slavery, quite the contrary, after abolishing slavery, after (sic!) civil war, it became no. 1 economy in 1871.

Here is the list of GPD countries in 1861, before the start of civil war:

1 - China - $199.6 billion

2 - India - $125.7 billion

3 - United Kingdom - $85.8 billion

4 - France - $72.3 billion

5 - Germany (Prussia and other states) - $52.4 billion

6 - Russian Empire - $49.6 billion

7 - United States - $44.2 billion

8 - Japan - $33.0 billion

9 - Austria-Hungary - $30.1 billion

10 - Ottoman Empire - $17.5 billion

Source: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/the-world-economy_...

have you ever heard of jim crow? and also hockey stick growth? hockey stick growth is the common hacker news ideology, i know you know what i'm talking about.

this is the history of labor in america, therefore relevant in an infographic that deals with the race and class dynamics of labor. sorry that you got offended by the truth.

Yeah, I knew where this was going but did stick around long enough to confirm it.

I guess there's a certain type of audience this works with, but I'm not part of it.

What, you don't believe white people were rolling around in chairs in the 1600s? lol.

Programmers sit more than Software developers. Programmers, stand up!

The presentation of data was nice (slides with a constant format) and the measured amount of labeling was great

"This story is about two kinds of workers in America"

Very pretty and very dark and totally impenetrable.

Cool visualization, but it is ultimately 20 slides that are saying the exact same thing (white collar workers are more privileged than blue collar workers). And not adding anything new to something everyone already knows.

I spent ten years in a plastics factory before switching to programming. I used to grab a roll of paper to sit on even though it made me look lazy compared to everyone else there, because standing is hard. So I feel that finding any new way to remind people every few years that we are sitting because others are standing is virtuous.

We also spend too much time on sympathy for people at the very bottom of the income tables, often there out of laziness or crime, compared to people who have twice the stress by being both low income and working hard for a living. They deserve more visibility.

Correct. The left tries to reach out to the proletariat but often only actually seems to speak to the lumpenproletariet. Marx thought the absolute bottom of society was scum, naturally fascist, and might as well not exist. Having been around your average bum on the west coast, it’s hard not to agree.

I have known since before the election that Trump is planning to deport all of the immigrants. I’ve been angry about it. I’ve talked to the people about it. I have argued with people about it, but I haven’t truly cognitively processed it.

When I got to the slide about immigrant workers, I broke down, crying, sobbing tears—no no no no that can’t happen here tears. I already knew. It was something I already knew.

The reality of such a thing is so horrible to contemplate that even if you can attach the faces of people you know to the coming horror, you’re more likely to think of it in abstract terms. 20 million people is a number we can’t fathom. But data allows us to process it in an abstract way, and can connect the abstract to something cognitively meaningful.

When I saw the data arranged that way I was forced to confront the abstract representation of this category of people that drove home cognitively what could be coming.

> I have known since before the election that Trump is planning to deport all of the immigrants.

Agree or disagree with the policy proposal, that is not what Trump has been saying at all. I don't know if this is an unforced error with some people in the discussion of American politics or a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters. There is a legal process for immigrating to the United States, it is a significantly easier process than that which exists in the majority of Western countries.

Those who follow the legal process are not being targeted by any policy proposal that's been espoused by any mainstream political candidate from any party in the United States, the issue has been and continues to be discussed only in the terms of people who immigrated to the United States illegally either via violating the terms of their visa, fraudulently receiving a visa, or crossing the border without a visa.

Please tone down your hyperbole.

people really believe this hyperbole. i hear it almost everyday working in tech.

many blue drones can't recognize their droneness, but will happily make fun of red drones.

There is just one problem. It'd have been good if they asked for your country before the questionnaire. $30,000 salary for a Software Developer seems less in America, but that is huge in some other countries

I think the questions assumed USA

Why are speech pathologists more often injured or ill than ambulance drivers, police officers and freight agents? That does not at all match my idea of that line of work.

Because speech pathologists are generally working with patients that have mental issues, speech issues are generally neurological, and those patients may not have the same emotional self-regulation and self-control as the average person and may act violently.

That said, I wouldn't consider it a particularly "dangerous" job. It's just that, despite the popular discourse, jobs like being a police officer are also really not that dangerous either. When the effect size is small it doesn't take much difference to be amplified in the data. Being a roofer is far more dangerous than being a police officer, even though that's not the typical mainstream narrative, as an example.

Great visualization but lost me at the end when it got a bit too preachy. Turning socioeconomic issues into race issues doesn't help anyone.

I think a more objective analysis would have been for skilled vs unskilled labor, supply/demand and age stratified.

It seems like a pretty series of infographics that are oriented towards some sort of narrative the creator is trying to impress on folks, something about guilt and unfairness?

It seems like the author put in a lot of work in order to demonstrate a thing that most people intuitively understand:

There's a large supply of unskilled or low skilled labor, so wages are less and the jobs are crappier and more physically demanding.

If you age stratify it, I feel pretty confident that you'd also see a trend that shows that most physical labor is performed by younger folks, and the percentage of their day spent doing physical labor mostly decreases as they progress in their lives and become more skilled.

I'm not talking just about desk jobs, I'm thinking (for example) of an apprentice electrician vs master electrician. One of those is going to get stuck doing the more physically demanding work while the other is in more of a supervisory role.

Interesting little site.

Born in a latin american country I was taught by my parents to always aim for the least amount of work for the most amount of pay. Basically avoid any standing job like the plague even though thats what they both did.

My mother yelled at me when I got my first job as a waiter and pressured me to find something else every month.

Eventually I got a IT desk job that paid minimum wage and worked my way up from there to software development.

A lot of standing job people do tell me they could never do what I do, sitting on a desk daily.

> A lot of standing job people do tell me they could never do what I do, sitting on a desk daily.

They're trying to insult you, not provide you with anecdotal information so that you can have a broader view of the world.

After this election, I’m more than happy to ratchet up resentment towards the top from the bottom. Oh you want to elect a “populist” who hates the “elites”? I’m going to give you something to resent then!

I solve this dilemma with a standing desk.

(But I've yet to upgrade to a treadmill desk.)

I have a standing desk. I seriously need to force myself to use it, though. The last time it's been moved up is about a month ago.

my trick: start the day standing and try to stand for as long as i can. i usually stay standing til my lunchtime walk and when i get back from my walk i still have energy to stand. if i sit then my focus wanes.

When I first started with my standing desk, I found it particularly useful to combat lunch coma.

If I compare our work in EU to US, every job is basically slave labor. Even sitters.

Eg.: I have 30 days of paid vacation, now I'm taking month off. Don't need to worry about my job, they cannot fire me. As I understand in US, if you take vacation longer than week, you're in the fear you will be fired. Is it true?

Job, IT, of course.

> As I understand in US, if you take vacation longer than week, you're in the fear you will be fired. Is it true?

This is a common misconception which comes from the fact that there are no federal required vacations. That does not mean companies don't offer vacations as a benefit. I have yet see any positions without offering any.

In IT it's pretty much universally quite good. I had 5 weeks before, but now we switched to unlimited (as long as you do your job ok). I now take around 6 weeks per year, and I don't really need more.

> This is a common misconception which comes from the fact that there are no federal required vacations.

You must never have been pressured not to take your vacation days or sick days. I think most people have been. I've seen people constructively fired for taking vacation, or even for taking their entire entitled maternity leave rather than cutting it short.

This is what I've meant. I've read some blogs, news etc. about people taking vacations. But still pressured to check email everyday.

Is this more common in startup companies? Or corporate comp.?

> As I understand in US, if you take vacation longer than week, you're in the fear you will be fired. Is it true?

I have a coworker who takes off 3 weeks in a row every year. Never been an issue.

In general in the US, tech companies have excellent benefits -- including plenty of vacation. Not as much as Europe but it's not bad.

I believe slaves are usually not compensated for their work and cannot leave their jobs.

I think the OP meant it metaphorically. "Basically" seems to signal this. Since metaphors are not the thing itself, there are necessarily aspects that do not fit. However, metaphors may be bad metaphors. So you may or may not have a point here. But this point should be made explicit to move the discussion forward.

Also, I suspect that the OP is not a native English speaker, because there seems to be a subtle difference between a narrow standard metaphorical use of "slave labo(u)r" in English along the lines of "work that is done by enslaved people or by people who are treated as though they are enslaved"[1] and a wider use for example in German were "Sklavenarbeit" means something like hard work under degrading conditions.[2]

[1] As Merrriam-Webster defines it at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slave%20labor

[2] Cf. for example the lemma "sklavenarbeit" in Grimms' dictionary: "sklavenarbeit, f. arbeit, die ein sklave thun musz, die einem sklaven ziemt, harte arbeit. Campe, schlavenarbeit, lavoro, fatica da schiavo. Kramer deutsch-it. dict. 2 (1702), 562a: schlavenarbeit thun müssen, dover faticare da schiavo. ebenda; was ists für mühe und sklavenarbeit der ackerbau. Herder bei Campe." https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=S30002

I think you will find that at least in UK English, "slave labour" is used almost exclusively in the second sense [1]. The UK not having reckoned as much with its history of actual enslavement, this term is significantly less loaded than it is in the US.

[1] Oxford dictionary: " (informal) work that is very hard and very badly paid", https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

Yes, very true, nice work. Yes, not a native speaker. Middle of Europe. Actually, several hundred years ago, our ancestors were slaves here :) (probable origin of slavs, who knows)

The distinction is that IME most Europeans (I am British for what it’s worth) - not all - but most - simply cannot fathom the concept of having any financial independence at all.

They need paid time off and paid maternity leave and all of that stuff because they can’t conceptualise putting away the money to do this themselves. Significant savings or investment are rare outside of a property.

It’s just money on the other side of the equation, government and socialised vs independent and free to use or not.

At the very bottom it’s not like it matters in either case, you might have time off but no money to do anything with it.

I don't think it's that simple, for at least two reasons I can immediately think of:

1) Several Americans live paycheck to paycheck with no significant savings outside of property either. One unexpected emergency is enough to empty the savings of most Americans [1](https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-emergency-away-study-shows-22...). The idea that Americans make more money and that makes up for the difference just doesn't play out in reality for all but the richest and luckiest.

2) Taking a 30 day vacation and coming back to the same job without any threat of repercussion is much more valuable than simply 30 days worth of saved wages. The average American worker can't just take 30 days off, even as leave without pay, and expect to come back to the same job. If they want a 30 day period with no work, the vast majority of American workers will have to quit their current job and then hope to be able to find a new one later - which certainly isn't a given if you're working unskilled jobs to begin with.

This vary between classes. Middle class people usually have enough money to live whole year without work. Also if you add social security into this equation, here in middle of EU, social security gives you certain portion of your previous paycheck as unemployment support, depends how high it is, you can also get rent support, which will pay you whole rent.

I work for a FAANG and a month, well planned, vacation is totally OK. If I want to take a week of I more or less need no notice, but for a month it would be expected I plan ahead what the people I work with should do.

I have 5 weeks vacation and unlimited sick days every year.

My experience of working for a couple of FAANGs does not mirror this - while I was never laid off during a vacation, I think every vacation over 3 weeks I ever took, I returned to discover that my team had either suffered a major reorg, or the entire project was cancelled, and I had to find another team to work on.

Yep, I've taken several three-week vacations and it's never been a problem. The main thing is just giving plenty of advance notice (and reminding people as it gets close) so my manager can schedule around it, and making sure projects are in a good state with arrangements made for anything that needs covering while I'm out.

> As I understand in US, if you take vacation longer than week, you're in the fear you will be fired. Is it true?

lol, do you get most of your information from retards on reddit?

It depends on the job. I’ve had jobs where you couldn’t get approval to take a week off and a week off at my current job is no big deal. Generally PTO is more generous as you become harder to replace.

A week? Nah. I’ve routinely taken two weeks to burn off PTO.

A month straight is probably a hard sell though, yes.

Yeah this is why I always take more than a month off between jobs.

Besides parental leave and the very rare even for FAANG companies who offer month long sabbaticals once every five years, a month is a hard sell.

For certain knowledge work, the job market is much stronger and orders of magnitude better paying in the US.

And nah, most if not all of my coworkers have taken two consecutive weeks off, and have taken roughly a total 25 days off the year excluding holidays.

My european wife (watching some US show) just asked me "what is it with Americans and their boxes*?" After determining the context of the question (being escorted out of the building with your personal items in a box) I attempted to explain At Will Employment...

* last time it was the red plastic cups, before that it was "being proud", etc. etc.

What an awful comparison

> As I understand in US, if you take vacation longer than week, you're in the fear you will be fired. Is it true?

No this is complete nonsense for 95%+ of jobs

Another way of looking at it is that it is indeed quite true. Only, with "at-will employment", you get to live in that same fear whether or not you take any vacation.

cool website, but I dont appreciate the false notion that " America got rich off of selling cotton picked by enslaved Black people"

Also the people who created the philosophical concepts that made the United States possible were all sitters.

This is really well done and was eye opening for me as I'm predominantly a sitter.

This is, very directly, a supply-and-demand problem. (That is not to say that it's a simple one, or that naive economics trivially applies here or will necessarily give correct answers, or especially that either the supply or demand are straightforward to change, just that it's a reasonable reasoning framework to start with.) The more people willing to do a job, the lower the standards of the lowest bidder. Solving this problem requires one or more of:

1) Raising the minimum standards of the lowest bidders on the worker side. This could be done through collective bargaining or regulation, making it so nobody is willing to "defect" (in the prisoner's dilemma sense) and work for conditions below a certain standard, which means there's little to no supply of such workers.

2) Raising the standards on the demand side. This could theoretically happen if consumers are willing to preferentially purchase from places that provide higher standards for workers; effectively, coordinate and collectively bargain on the purchasing side. This seems unlikely to happen as consumers are even more likely to "defect" and purchase from the least expensive company. This is one case where a simplistic model breaks down: consumers' ability to collectively demand higher standards for how companies treat their workers is limited by the fact that consumers are getting their income and ability to afford higher standards from the work they're doing.

3) Lowering the supply of labor across the board. This would happen if fewer people are willing to do the job, such as if people didn't have to work in order to survive (e.g. UBI). If there isn't an endless supply of workers who have to tolerate whatever conditions get them paid enough to survive, satisfying demand for labor requires substantially higher standards for pay and working conditions. (Conversely, if everyone in a workplace wants to be there, it's easier to get quality output.)

4) Raising the demand for labor across the board. This isn't going to happen, as it'd run counter to some of the primary defining qualities of an improving society; even if it did, it would be likely to ultimately result in similar stratification between groups of workers.

5) Raise the mobility from one category of labor to another. Constantly being worked on in many different ways, but will inherently never be able to fully solve the problem because not enough people can take advantage of this option to avoid stratification.

The feasible alternatives here feed back both positively and negatively into each other.

Personally, I think implementing (3) via UBI is the one most likely in terms of feasibility. (Not politically in terms of passing it, but practically in terms of how monumentally effective it would be compared to the rest.) (3) is the option here most immune to the prisoners' dilemma defection problem.

Interesting that the reader is ranked in 2D space on dimensions for which the reader provided a single bit of data ("Able to pause work"). I wonder how those dimensions are inferred.

All I see is trivialities.

I hate how everything on this site is constantly and slowly moving.

That escalated quickly.

So this is not about male toilet use.

100% what I too thought it would be about.

Very nice. My favorite definition of "blue collar vs white collar" is whether you wash your hands before or after you use the toilet. Not entirely true, but that's the gist of it.

I felt like I was being preached to by an ideologue, with some meh animated charts thrown in to sweeten the pill.

this is a ridiculous graph which mistakes temporary behaviors for entire human beings. I worked about 10 years doing handyman work, and now 10 years doing web development, often both in the same day.

thanks for injecting race into this!

Some people like to show off their creativity by making tenuous claims that every single thing is racist

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