Many of the comments on this article are so cold. I can’t believe it. When I read the original article I was imagining all the constructive ways HN readers would interpret it and hold a mirror up to their own behaviour. Some commenters are doing this. But it surprises and depresses me how many people are commenting saying “no, this list isn’t what it says it is, it’s a list showing the author has a negative mindset / is not from the Valley bubble, and that problem can be fixed by just getting over it.”. We can do better than that.
As someone who has sat at some interesting class and race intersections during my career in tech, including my time at some very prestigious institutions like the University of Cambridge and FAANG, and has exhibited and noticed many of the listed behaviours and the lack there of, I can say this article had the undeniable ring of truth and made me feel sick to my stomach. Guilty for when I’ve been on the rich side and angry for the times I’ve been on the poor side.
The psychology of growing up with financial uncertainty - and a risk of racial exclusion - is hard to shake and can be passed from parent to child. My life has mostly been financially blessed but you can’t buy your way out of the mindset, or snap your fingers / empty the cache / cycle the power the way the average HN commenter seems to think you can.
This is a case of the contrarian dynamic: an initial wave of objections to the article, followed by a wave of objections to the objections. The latter get upvoted, and so we end up with a top comment saying "I can't believe the comments in this thread" or (as in the current example) "the comments here are so $bad_somehow". Recent explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616. More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It's important to be aware that this is a mechanical process. The first comments to appear in a thread are there because they're the fastest to write, not because they come from "the average HN commenter". Another way of putting this is that the initial comments tend to be reflexive rather than reflective: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... (Objecting to objections can be reflexive also, but at least the second wave tends to be more substantive and charitable.)
Replies are welcome, but I've collapsed this subthread to prevent the page from going too far off topic. Sorry—I know that my comment is just as off topic. But it has an educational function (at least under optimistic assumptions) and that requires people seeing it.
That's possible. I haven't read the whole thread, and am taking the GP's word for how they perceived it, since it's the perception that creates the reaction anyhow.
"reflexive rather than reflective". Thanks. I learned something very useful. I'll always try to recall it when I can't understand why I am having an argument at all.
I think this could be useful. Or maybe something like suppress the first half hour of comments and then show them all at once but in reverse chronological order.
It’s possible that the current system is fine as it is, and that Dan is simply explaining how it is. Suppressing comments is an interesting idea, but there are all kinds of second order effects — if it’s a disaster story, people need to communicate. If it’s not, the ranking algorithm would need to be adjusted, since the suppressed comments have an unfair time penalty. And so on.
In some ways it's a laundry list of ways rich people in the Bay Area act like wankers, which is interesting, but also quite irritatingly stereotypical. There are plenty who don't refuse to talk to the cleaning staff, lecture others on their choice of tampon, or snob fat people at the gym.
I don't want people from outside the bubble (e.g. me, three years ago) to read this and think they'll be surrounded by wall-to-wall wankery and class prejudice if they take a job at a SF startup, because it's not wholly representative of all employees at all startups. Most of them are nice. Most people everywhere are nice.
I came from a family of coal miners and moved to the bay for a tech job. The second paragraph is more of the truth than I think people want to admit. People are nice, but they are also wankers. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them a lot of the time, it’s just they are extremely, extremely naive and sometimes in their naive ness and lack of perspective say incredibly offensive things. You have to shrug it off like you are part of the in group even though they just insulted your family. No one told me about this part of the job in college.
Much of this comes down to 'theory of mind' though. I wouldn't be surprised if someone in that group misguidedly said the same about you, and that you'd be utterly shocked to hear it. At the end of the day, I feel a good number of these problems have more to do with poor communication rather than tribalism.
And as Scott Adams likes to say, you can't fix what you don't talk about. So perhaps shrugging things off is not as noble as you think it is, because that makes you complicit in perpetuating that problem.
One of my most mature and eye-opening moments was when I realised that if someone mistreats you, but they seem unaware of it, and you don't tell them this is the case, then when they do it a second time and you get pissed off, you are in fact the asshole in this scenario, not them. Because if you implode a year later when it has happend for the Nth time, and you call them an asshole for having done it N times, they will very reasonably be upset you didn't trust them enough to set that boundary from day 1 when it first happened, but simply assumed they were naturally an asshole and not worth your time. Whereas if you immediate point your boundaries as soon as they're crossed, this leads to respect and mutual understanding, because you care enough about the engagement to set respectful rules for it. I have never met anyone since who didn't appreciate me setting clear, reasonable, respectful boundaries as soon as they crossed a line. Not only that, this tends to lead to people feeling more comfortable to share their own boundaries, which has more than once shown me my own stupidity when dealing with people, and I was more than grateful for them letting me know in a respectful manner.
I also do not read this article that way. I think she does not complain about them. Most of them are most likely nice people (ignoring the gym paragraph). She reflect that "she realizes" that she is "poor compared to them". She does not imply that they are bad people or that she feels miserable about her "poorness" (she seems to earn much more than before .. and quit ... and probably got something better ... and ... seems to write a successful novelthingy)
The only other implicit criticism toward her coworkers was ignoring and not greeting the cleaning staff. For the most part, her coworkers come across as privileged, rather than mean or otherwise morally deficient.
I'm not sure I see anything wrong with not bothering the cleaning staff while they're at work. The whole reason they've been hired is to spare everyone else the time and effort involved in cleaning, so to have everyone waste time on greetings would just be demeaning their work.
I usually nod or say a quick greeting in passing as I head out for the evening. I've also thanked the guy who refills the soda can dispenser, pointing out that the company runs on caffeine. Each of these interactions takes less than 30 seconds and reminds us of our shared experience on this planet.
There is a difference between “not bothering the cleaning staff” and not acknowledging that they exist and are human and are standing right in front of you.
Author is describing the second, and it happens pervasively in the upper classes.
Sadly, this is true. Though it also leaves a huge opportunity for people to encourage cleaning staff (or drivers or any other manual labor in cultures that privilege intellectual work) with brief yet heartfelt greetings and genuine thanks for the valuable work they do.
Seeing and thanking overlooked people for the work they do takes almost no time if its habitual, yet can potentially brighten someone's day.
>The whole reason they've been hired is to spare everyone else the time
Do you extend this to other jobs as well? Is it demeaning to say hello to your boss because she's been hired to spare you the time of managerial decisions? What about the QA folks who've been hired to save you the time of executing tests?
Shame on you for telling the truth. You have a right not to speak to anyone you don't want to speak to. You are probably smart as shit and make close to a million a year. Hell, I'd be a dick if I made that kind of cheese.
Not to detract from the broader point, which I completely agree with, but the gym example didn't strike me as a Valley-specific phenomenon. I could imagine something similar happening at a gym in a working class neighborhood, and I could also think of gyms which welcome all, regardless of being a beginner or not.
People not near the median get critiqued often for their weight, and it happens to underweight people too.
She didn't really elaborate on why she didn't feel welcome in the gym. I've felt out of place and unwelcome in gyms - but it was all in my head. Nobody said or did anything to make me feel that way, they were all just in really great shape.
I've also had it made explicitly clear to me that I wasn't welcome in certain places.
> In some ways it's a laundry list of ways rich people in the Bay Area act like wankers, which is interesting, but also quite irritatingly stereotypical.
I dont think this is true about article at all. Quite a few points are not complains about other peoples behavior nor do they contain anything bad. I do indoor climbing, it does cost money, we talked about climbing in the work a lot. I would really have to work hard to perceive myself being criticizes by that point.
Many are about authors own behavior.
The thing with tampons was that rich person would not think of that tampon as "save me money" resource the way poor person did. Telling you not to use this or that for bogus health reasons is not something exlusive to rich people and author does not claim so. It just made the encounter more annoying.
>Quite a few points are not complains about other peoples behavior nor do they contain anything bad. I do indoor climbing, it does cost money, we talked about climbing in the work a lot. I would really have to work hard to perceive myself being criticizes by that point.
I find myself in that situation quite frequently when it comes to sports cars. They are easily my biggest passion, but unfortunately it's not a cheap hobby. Even though I'm not struggling financially nor am I rolling in piles of cash, I'm certain that I'm far more comfortable spending a much higher percentage of my income towards them than other people. If the subject of cars comes up I often find myself talking about cars that are 2-3x more expensive than most other people in my income bracket are willing to spend, and I've realized how that makes me look to someone who only views cars as appliances and knows nothing of my personal finances. I've tried to bite my tongue and limit the amount of car related discussions I have with people who aren't auto enthusiasts. It makes me look like an out of touch person much wealthier than I really am, bragging about something they couldn't care less about.
>I dont think this is true about article at all. Quite a few points are not complains about other peoples behavior nor do they contain anything bad. I do indoor climbing, it does cost money, we talked about climbing in the work a lot. I would really have to work hard to perceive myself being criticizes by that point.
I did not read the article as commenting about what is "bad" about the tech industry but rather about how the homogeneity of the culture can make people feel alienated. Imagine your statement written by someone else read:
"I dont think this is true about article at all. Quite a few points are not complains about other peoples behavior nor do they contain anything bad. I have a super yacht, it does cost money, we talked about the best places to take our super-yachts at work a lot. I would really have to work hard to perceive myself being criticizes by that point."
Can you see how that would cause some people to feel alienated? Just because something is normative to you and your peer group does not mean it's normative across the board. It also doesn't mean it's automatically good or bad.
Climbing is something that basically anyone can do, it improves your fitness and reduces the load on the healthcare system. Super yachts are something that almost no one can have, probably causes some pollution and otherwise doesn't really do anything useful? How can you compare the two?
The author looks like she has to pass through doors sideways, so I can see how she might feel alienated by an activity that requires one to pull their own weight. I am quite sure that making people that are unhealthy by choice feel alienated is a good thing, all in all.
Did you read my comment and comment I was responding to before writing yours? The parent complains that article listed things "act like wankers". Which clearly means "bad".
Second, I worked with people who had completely different hobbies and interests than I do. I am not always in dominant majority, with climbing in that team I was.
As far as I know, people having hobbies I don't care about is completely normal.
Yes, I read the parent comment. I originally typed out in my previous post that I felt you may have missed the point of the article, but I felt that was too harsh. I don't think the main takeaway from the article should be certain things commonplace in tech culture are "bad" but how it can be alienating. To that point, both yours and the parent post seem overly concerned with the "bad vs. good" distinction. I do have some issues with the article, but I think alienating certain people (whether conscious or not) is something we should be concerned about.
Edit: it looks like you've edited your comment quite a bit since I first replied but I think there's another important clarification:
>As far as I know, people having hobbies I don't care about is completely normal.
I'm not using "normative" to define "weird or not-weird" but rather commonplace. So regarding the article and your example, indoor climbing may be commonplace in your peer-group while still being non-normative in someone like the author's peer-group. Pile enough of these together and it's easy to see how one may begin to feel alienated.
1) talk about what you like, even if other people don’t connect well (be yourself at work?)
2) only like things other people connect with (seems limiting, but probably good for the social interactions)
3) pretend to like things others do and don’t talk about what you like (pretty much the definition of the conversationalist, but doing that all the time seems fake and probably unhealthy mentally for too long?)
4) never talk about anything controversial at all - aka the big Corp, how’s the weather answer.
You can’t be authentic AND make everyone happy. Literally impossible. If someone is alienated by someone talking about who they are, whose responsibility is that anyway?
I certainly wasn’t wealthy when I was growing up (or frankly had anything but hand me downs 90% of the time), but I still found ways to get out and do stuff I liked - salvaged old computers, went exploring in the desert, etc. it often meant not really connecting with mainstream folks (who were more interested in sports or the like), and I found it pretty alienating trying to have ‘small talk’ with 99% of the folks around me frankly.
Learning how to connect with them was a skill it took a lot of time and effort to hone - it would not have helped them or me to think they had a duty to not be who there were or care about anything but what they cared about IMO. Anymore than me any my stuff.
>Learning how to connect with them was a skill it took a lot of time and effort to hone
This was my main issue with the article. The author seemed so hyper-focused on the differences she saw day-to-day that she seemed unable to overcome them to find common ground to connect.
>You can’t be authentic AND make everyone happy. Literally impossible. If someone is alienated by someone talking about who they are
This isn't really what I was getting at though. To me, the issue isn't whether or not we can talk about or be our authentic selves, but more about creating a monolithic culture that has in-groups and out-groups. You can have a culture that is homogenous but still accepts those from the outside as equals. In that context, I don't think your assertions hold; you don't have to have the same interests to connect with people. For example, you can connect by being legitimately curious about differing interests as long as it's a culture that is open to different interests without using them as a defining characteristic. From the author's perspective, it seems like she still felt like an outsider. How much of that was in her own head stemming from insecurities about being poor, I don't know.
> you can connect by being legitimately curious about differing interests as long as it's a culture that is open to different interests without using them as a defining characteristic.
100% agree with that. Differences shouldn't make you exclude other people. Like the example where people just ignore the cleaning staff. It just tells alot how the people there are privileged. I worked at an engineering firm and people generally do acknowledge the cleaning staff. They're people too regardless of their position or work.
That’s because she WAS an outsider? Being welcomed doesn’t change that. The only thing that can change that is assimilation on a persons side combined with a willingness from the surrounding body to assimilate.
Even then, it’s usually easy to find areas where there are gaps, if you look.
People can, have, and will continue to form in and out groups. Calling out particularly problematic instances can help (and be necessary) but it’s never actually going away, anymore than crime, poverty, success, failure, etc. It’s a fundamental human (and other species) survival strategy required by and a byproduct of the world we are in.
This is true everywhere, about pretty much everything, and has pros and cons.
It doesn’t sound like they were doing anything particularly obnoxious, just not particularly awesome.
If you look for problems, you’ll find them. Most environments in my experience are a lot less welcoming than what she was describing. Each of these places I’ll note were very welcoming, and for every one of these items I’ve got 10 of people inviting me into their homes or spending time to get to know me and what my circumstances were like.
when I lived in Singapore for a bit, pretty much anyone over 30ish years old would stop and stare at me for minutes if I was outside a financial center. Any sort of discussion with older Chinese folks would inevitably end up with the word ‘Gwailo’ mixed in there somewhere. My first name was hard to pronounce for folks who speak Cantonese in particular, which didn’t help.
India, I’d get random scams directed my way because it seemed like they assumed I was a soft in the head westerner. Everything had a huge markup associated with it (white guy tax I heard a local friend call it). At least I knew enough to not push the cow away when I visited a local temple and one came up and started to sneeze on myself and a friend.
Munich Germany, while on a walk some folks got visibly angry (and one couple yelled at me) when they stopped me to ask me directions and I didn’t know German. I guess wearing a black t-shirt and jeans made them think I was lying to them or something? I don’t know enough German to know for sure what they said, but boy were they not happy.
Japan, I was always welcomed and everyone was very friendly - and very clear that I was not Japanese and needed my hand held at every step. Getting picked out of lines I was doing perfectly fine in so someone could give me hands on personal care was sometimes convenient, but it was clear that I was getting singled out. A friend of mine who lived there for many years and is married to a Japanese woman describes it as ‘you’ll always be treated like a drunk guest that drank too much, and needs help getting home safely’. He speaks fluent Japanese, is very familiar with all the customs, and has been married to his wife for over a decade and still gets the treatment.
Are these problems? I mean, I could write a book on each of those places and many more if that’s what I wanted to focus on. I could also write 10 on the positives each culture had, how much they welcomed me and supported me and others.
You’ve hit on my main qualms with the article that I’ve elaborated on elsewhere in this thread, namely that I think she came in with a self-fulfilling prophesy about being an outsider.
>That’s because she WAS an outsider
This is a bit in line with that same problem. Is she an outsider because she’s “poor”? Because she likes different hobbies? I’d like to think we should aspire to define our in-groups by less superficial means. I’m sure she could have been an “insider” if she (and others) didn’t define their tribes this way
Nod, for sure. Though I suspect not defining it this way is also a bit of a ‘don’t think of the purple elephant’ problem - just not how most (all?) people work.
We can aspire to do better, but that doesn’t mean others will agree that it is useful for them or a goal for them either.
> So regarding the article and your example, indoor climbing may be commonplace in your peer-group while still being non-normative in someone like the author's peer-group.
It was normative in that one team and is not normative in other groups I am member of. You seem to assume I am perfect social fit in all teams and groups I am member off.
That is just not the case. Climbing made me normative in that place. We talked about it a lot, note past tense. And in other places they talked about stuff that profoundly is not interesting or available ro me.
It is super odd to me that you assume that normal state is to be perfect fit for working group you are in.
>You seem to assume I am perfect social fit in all teams and groups I am member off.
I made no such claims. I literally only used the sole example you used.
>It is super odd to me that you assume that normal state is to be perfect fit for working group you are in.
Again, you are putting words in my mouth. All I am stating is that if you find yourself in a fairly homogenous group that you don't necessarily fit in, it can be an alienating experience. My only other claim is that point seemed to fly by you because you were more concerned with things you're interested in, like indoor rock climbing, being painted as "bad".
>It is super odd to me that you assume that normal state is to be perfect fit for working group you are in.
I’m not sure how you can have this takeaway. My point is literally the exact opposite idea about how homogeneous cultures can be alienating if we aren’t careful.
> because you were more concerned with things you're interested in, like indoor rock climbing, being painted as "bad"
I was literally primary concerned opposing the original message I responded to - the one that claimed article says those hobbies are bad. It does not sound terribly difficult to understand to me. I opposed characterization of article itself.
You are trying to explain to me something about alienation when people in the room dont have the same hobbies, which has nothing to do with my point.
>I was literally primary concerned opposing the original message I responded to
I know, and what I'm trying to point out is that it misses what I consider the larger point. Your point above is tantamount to a "they started it" defense. Both you and the person you are responding to can be simultaneously missing the bigger picture. I was deliberately responding to the child comment because it would address both the child and the parent. My point is that your comment (and the one you responded towards) is wrongly focused, which has very much to do with your point. The fact that you seem unwilling or unable to see that perspective, even just to refute it, makes this dialogue tiresome. It would be like somebody writing an article about how a politician's rhetoric is divisive and somebody constantly defends it by saying it's eloquent...you can be "not-wrong" and still miss the point.
The word wanker in Australian English denotes a specific kind of negativity, attached to egotism and acting as though you're better than others. I shouldn't have used it on HN, as it's a poor choice of phrasing for an international audience.
As per [0], "the socially leveling term wanker ridicules a person who is pretentious and arrogant, thereby suggesting that humility, solidarity and being down-to-earth are highly valued qualities in Australian society." Vocally complaining about unbleached tampons and flying to Greece for one weekend are textbook wanker behaviour. I'm not sure of a good American English word to substitute.
>In some ways it's a laundry list of ways rich people in the Bay Area act like wankers, which is interesting, but also quite irritatingly stereotypical.
People have a tendency to act irritatingly stereotypical too.
Even without the race element - there’s definitely a class thing.
I noticed it when I moved to the Bay Area after growing up in western New York. The types of foods people ate or didn’t eat, the restaurants people would or would not go to.
The shows people would or would not watch, even the way people talked. I think I hadn’t really seen the difference in class behavior before in America. Now it’s easy to see it.
A lot of it is tightly correlated to wealth and a lot of it reminds me of things the author describes (fear of not being able to find a job, fear of just “taking a year off” because it sounds financially crazy), but it’s not only about wealth really.
You can be poor and still act more “upper class” and you can be rich and still act “working class”. It’s a lot of little things people do in preferences and how they talk/behave.
Much racism in America is actually classism. That's why something like Henry Louis Gates being profiled by a neighbor and a policeman as he was trying to get back to his Harvard home makes the news: Gates is an educated upper-class black man, and in this case he was treated as the latter rather than the former.
I think you could argue that the opposite is true. Much classism in America is actually racism. For example, opposition to welfare programs have often been motivated by racist tropes like welfare queens. The truth is that racism and classism in America are deeply intertwined.
We have the same discourse around welfare in the UK, where the stereotypical poor person is white. I'll bet you a bag of Hot Cheetos they have it in Hungary, Japan, and other ethnically homogeneous countries.
Welfare may be a bad example because I think there are more white people on welfare in general? Would potentially be evidence of class divide.
I think there’s truth in what you’re saying though - single family zoning is an easy example. Also when they talk about welfare on the news and only show black people (even though more white people are on welfare iirc) - or how the sister reply to your comment gets indignant demanding you “explain how opposition to welfare is racism” and in the next sentence complains about minority communities. So there’s definitely a racial component.
I guess I mostly agree, we just see race more easily than class because of arbitrary skin color categorization. I hope in the future both are irrelevant.
Explain how opposition to welfare programs is racism. Also, please explain why impoverished minority communities have not vastly improved regardless of the constantly increasing money tossed into welfare programs.
The comment wasn't that opposition to welfare programs was solely caused by racism, just that it was one motivation. It's easier to defend a racist policy if racism is never explicitly brought up, the policy just has a disparate impact along racial lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#%22Southern_strate...
>The comment wasn't that opposition to welfare programs was solely caused by racism, just that it was one motivation
Ok so how would one oppose welfare programs and not be labeled racist? Do you believe there are no individuals taking advantage of the welfare system and that pointing out anyone who is would be racist?
My point was to try and get the poster to tell us how we can be critical of welfare programs without being racist. Since they never answered I'm going to assume, like most people with this stance, they think ANY criticism against it is racism and no discussion should happen. Assuming that every black single woman is a 'welfare queen' would be racist but the idea that there are individuals who take advantage of the system is not, especially since it's true. Focusing on a term that some find offensive seems like a waste of time and a distraction from real discussion on the issue.
Opposition to welfare programs happens in countries without race related problems as well. How do you distinguish between such opposition if you're going along with "that affects particular race more that's why they oppose it" argument. You can paint everyone to be racist this way.
Opposition to welfare is not racist per se. But it has been used by politicians and pundits in the US as a dog whistle to drive a racial wedge between white and Black Americans. It's not explicit, and that's the point [0].
Yeah, it has been used but the way the argument goes it's impossible to form an argument against a welfare program without being painted a racist.
What I mean is that a line of reasoning so often used these days: "this affects race X more therefore it's racist/racially motivated" is just incorrect thinking.
Have you heard of intergenerational wealth, which is one of the issues described in the OP article? Then, have you further heard of redlining, Jim Crow, slavery, sharecropping, lynchings, hiring discrimination, justice system discrimination, police discrimination, urban ghettoization, locally-funded school districts based on local property taxes, code switching speech, cultural discrimination on styles of dress and hair, and the digital divide?
Would you like to take any guesses of any of those issues not being involved in poor members of minority groups remaining poor?
There are no straw men here and it's insulting that you'd accuse a stranger acting in good faith of that.
It's a direct answer to "Also, please explain why impoverished minority communities have not vastly improved regardless of the constantly increasing money tossed into welfare programs."
Food assistance, subsidized housing, and monthly cash payments are only really short-term stabilizing tools. For that they can be useful, but those systems are not designed or equipped to vastly improve the wealth and self-reliance of impoverished communities.
The key word in "impoverished minority communities" is "communities". Good schools, grocery stores, street maintenance, good transit, good jobs within driving distance, fair lending (and honestly lending practices designed to fix the damage of generations of unfair lending), vocational training, job placement assistance, enforcement of building codes on landlord-owned buildings, stable utility infrastructure including broadband Internet, and other things stable, wealthier communities take for granted are necessary to have a stable, flourishing community population.
> You can be poor and still act more “upper class” and you can be rich and still act “working class”.
You are stunningly naive if you think that a poor person acting more "upper class" isn't reminded that they're "out of their lane" more than someone rich acting "working class".
Spot on. Every time I wear "fancy" clothes I'm constantly worrying that everyone is pointing at me thinking "we know who you really are, you're poor and don't deserve to be acting this way". This is despite me moving away from my poor town years ago and establishing a solid job for myself. Nobody in my new town knows me at all yet I assume they know I came from a "less than" background. A poor person must undo decades of the effects poverty inflicts to truly appear "rich" where a rich person must simply "lower their standards" to act working class.
> must simply "lower their standards" to act working class.
You make that sound easy, but I see the situation as symmetric. For example, my wife grew up wealthier than I did - and when it came time for us to buy a car, her first question was "how big a car would we need to comfortably move our family around" while mine was "what's the most affordable?"
it's a completely different mindset - she is frustrated that I default to a poor mindset and I am frustrated that she defaults to a rich one. Neither one is easy to switch.
I'm talking about the case where a person doesn't get to "choose" to act poor. The poor person doesn't get to choose to think other than what is affordable, where someone with more money gets the choice to thinking of things other than affordability, like comfortably. The mindset that develops from a lack of agency in one's life is more traumatizing than one that does have that agency but must learn to change their mindset. Different people might not be as effected by poverty however.
You don't need anything even close to overly "fancy"; if you're the average poor person, you can vastly improve your image simply by wearing any sort of formal clothes, as in a suit and tie. Even if others "know who you really are" they'll still appreciate that you're making the effort to relate to them, and that's what matters. We tend to forget stuff like this as we lose sight of the value of enduring traditions, but if you look at visual records of how older generations behaved you'll see plenty of poorer folks looking quite comfortable in formal wear.
You're still not going to look right, though. You will have the "wrong" shoes, or you'll keep them so long from thrift that they'll go out of fashion. Your one set of nice clothes is precious to you in a way that the one-out-of-ten is not to someone in the upper class, and that will make you wear it differently.
But poor people hate feeling like they have to change their appearance to get the approval of the privileged classes. Feeling like you have to visually and verbally code switch to get "better" people to respect you just feels bad. Spending precious money on the cheapest formal wear you can find just so people will take you seriously further cements the divide poor people feel.
> But poor people hate feeling like they have to change their appearance to get the approval of the privileged classes.
You say that like everyone else isn't doing the exact same thing. Being privileged is all about playing the "get everyone else's approval" game. But coming from a different social context it's even more basically a way of showing others respect and earning their trust, so it's not without consequence.
It loops back around at the top. It’s why there’s an eccentric rich person trope and why it’s called “fuck you” money.
If you’re totally financially independent you’re more free to do what you want, independent of class behavior expectations (or even in contradiction of them). They no longer matter that much (unless you’re doing something that requires politics or people).
You're right, everyone is doing that to some degree at some point through out their life. But consider that there exists people who feel they need to dress better just to get the basic respect they deserve. In the case where someone cannot afford the appropriate clothing, it ostensibly seems they are unable to show the respect you speak of and are deemed "less than" because of that, but really their minds and character is the same regardless of clothing. Being privileged is having the agency to pay for the kinds of clothes that impress people and causes them to respect you, and in some cases, without having much other than a nice suit to justify such respect.
No need to go for the throat there. And especially not when you're not totally correct.
Paul Fussell's Class documents the exact phenomenon OP describes. Wealth is not class [1]; class is much more complex. For example, poor academics are higher class than rich blue-collar workers. Donald Trump is crazy rich but affects many of the working-class behaviours described in said book (technically "high prole"). Barack Obama has much less money but most would view him as upper-middle class. Nobody would accuse the above of being "out of their lane".
My very rough approximation: class is something like the integral of wealth over very long periods of time. Being rich and well-connected for long periods gives you a chance to accumulate high-status behaviours and preferences, which can persist even when the wealth doesn't, and continue to confer benefits. Preferring golf or tennis to say, bowling, doesn't necessarily come with a major difference in affordability. But being good at golf might help your career more than bowling. Reading more helps in tons of ways, and most people only pick up this habit if they grow up with access to good education and parental cognitive surplus.
On a related note, I think the US approach to dismissing class is preferable to the UK where it’s very explicit.
While both approaches have issues, when it’s explicit in the culture people seem to discriminate on it more (or even self-sort themselves based on identity).
I think ideally it’s better for a culture to try to not do that, but pragmatically it’s good to be aware of its existence in order to be successful. I mostly chalk it up to social skills.
On specifically being told to “stay in your lane” my point was more that if you’re behaving a certain way you won’t be told that, because the other people will assume you’re like them. It’s not only about wealth (though as in the article, the behavior is often related).
> On a related note, I think the US approach to dismissing class is preferable to the UK where it’s very explicit.
Huh. My perception has always been that America is far more obsessed with class and “keeping up with the Joneses” than Britain.
That said, I have in the past been called “rich” in a derogatory manner just for owning an iPad. But that’s more an amusing anecdote than social commentary. I find this type of thing to be the exception rather than the norm.
For context I’m a Brit with a decent job but my family is certainly not upper middle class or even middle class and all my friends are working class because those are the people I naturally get along with. For the most part the fact I make more money doesn’t cause any friction in those social circles. One of my mates even said to me if he didn’t know better he’d assume I lived on a council estate.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is the class lines are very blurred in modern day British society except for at the extremes. As such it’s not something people tend to obsess over.
On the other hand I’ve found that, in general, middle class Yanks tend to care more about being perceived a certain way so people know they’re middle class or upper middle class or whatever else. I’ve even seen them argue over exactly what constitutes “real” upper middle class compared to regular middle class. Not something I’ve ever seen Brits do.
Cross-Atlantic class discourse is always somewhat tricky since a car factory assembly line worker would be considered middle class in the US (based on income) but working class in the UK (based on status.) As a Brit in the US I find it kinda fascinating.
> My perception has always been that America is far more obsessed with class and “keeping up with the Joneses” than Britain.
The US is obsessed with material consumption. As such it probably plays a bigger part in status here than in the UK.
> I guess the point I’m trying to make is the class lines are very blurred in modern day British society except for at the extremes.
Perhaps this is a reflection of increasing university education and the changing nature of work away from factory jobs. In a way it's a move to a more American view of class, where most people are considered 'middle class'.
> As such it’s not something people tend to obsess over.
> I’ve even seen them argue over exactly what constitutes “real” upper middle class compared to regular middle class. Not something I’ve ever seen Brits do.
Brits regularly obsess over whether someone or some hob qualifies as working class or not though!
Donald Trump is as high class as it gets. From upbringing to the way his career developed. To the people he socializes with.
> Being rich and well-connected for long periods ... which can persist even when the wealth doesn't, and continue to confer benefits. Preferring golf or tennis to say, bowling, doesn't necessarily come with a major difference in affordability. But being good at golf might help your career more than bowling
He was literally rich from the day he was born to old age. He was getting those benefits whole his life. He plays golf.
My point is, he speaks exactly how he learned to speak in environment of rich people.
He is not all that much how actual working class behaves. Instead, he is his how middle class imagines working class. And people who vote him are economically not the poorest either. And he is also what poor people imagine super rich to be.
Your statement, worded differently, seems to read "it's high class in low class circles". Are you implying class is only appropriately defined only by those in high-class? I guess I was looking at it as social prestige regardless of who in the social strata assigns it. In other words, if enough 'low-class' people think you're high-class, you're by definition high-class.
Class is defined by the members of each group. Non-members are by definition mostly ignorant of the groups' culture that they are not a part of. So they can recognize people are different from them, but not which group they belong to.
"low-class" people would not determine who is "high-class" any more than the "high-class" people determine who is "low-class".
I think this is school dependent. In my experience, many wealthy kids will hide behaviors they know are associated with being wealthy / hide their backgrounds in order to better fit in. The awkwardness goes both ways.
Well, my country is the US, and I am speaking from experience. I'm definitely not saying it's a good thing. It's just important to acknowledge that "the college experience" of elites and the elite-adjacent doesn't represent the common post-secondary case here.
> Many of the comments on this article are so cold.
I mean, the tone of the article is pretty much "me vs them", so is really any surprise that some people would take offense?
The anecdotes range anywhere from caricatures (hot cheetos) to gaffes (cheering over a bonus cheque). What you're implying is that one ought to be empathetic about the OP's struggles w/ "rich person etiquette". But that in itself is a bit tone deaf: it comes across as "first world problems" to those who aren't in the "silicon valley bubble" and it comes across as elitism strawmen to those whose entire careers are in Bay Area tech.
It's kinda like listening to Justin Bieber sing about how lonely he is. It might strictly be true that he struggles w/ loneliness, and it might strictly be true that empathizing with him is "the right thing to do", but it's also strictly true that everyone has a right to not give a rats ass.
The "poor" mindset varies from person to person. Sure there are people that struggle w/ ghetto mindset, but I've had conversations with many people who self-identified as "cheap bastards" (in their own words) who would talk about slowly coming to terms with the fact that they now had decent incomes and disposable money.
Being HN, people love to debate, and god forbid you give an in for moral high-grounding.
My student loans were crushing at one point. Now I require my friends and family to remind me the weight of a 'few thousands'. I feel drawn towards a bubble where I can do opulent activities without guilt. I've heard people say to me "yeah, eventually you just cut off those friends still working at McDonald's". I've never agreed - it takes an arrogant self-realization to agree with such a statement - but I've felt the gradual drift. The article is a good reminder in humility.
> yeah, eventually you just cut off those friends still working at McDonald's
That's profound. As "the friend in tech", I've never had this said to my face, but have definitely felt it. There's an us-versus-them mentality when it comes to dealing with those who aren't also in tech; that, somehow, there's no reason to be friends with those who aren't also white-collar professionals. What's more, my own tendency to be friends with non-professionals has in some cases alienated me - who wants to go to a housewarming where half of the people bring Bud Light and tell inappropriate jokes?
This split is something I've personally had a lot of trouble rationalizing.
This hits home with me as well. My spouse and I live a “DINK” lifestyle - dual income, no kids. He works from home for an established (not a startup) multi-billion dollar multinational in the Valley, so we live on the East Coast. He is well compensated enough that I don’t have to work, but I do run our investment property and a small business we founded.
The problems we have now are ones most of my own family can’t relate to, so I just don’t share them. His parents used to run an extremely lucrative firm, but that was after they raised him in much less lavish circumstances. So I can talk to them about some of these parts of life, and he and his parents know the value of a dollar.
It can be isolating to know how “both halves” live, and I definitely feel a sense of guilt as to the amount of privilege I have and how radically more easy we have it.
It does start to become hard to relate to people who don’t have this kind of socioeconomic standing because so much of life is built on how many assets you do or don’t have. Last year we were at Home Depot buying a new, rather pricey appliance for our new home and I realized in talking to the sales lady exactly how out of touch I had become. She had never had what we were purchasing and we were buying a high end model from a high end brand. I was trying to make small talk and I’m sure I sounded like a classist asshole, but I was trying not to.
I’m trying really hard to cling to a realistic relationship to money and class.
I didn't hear it from someone in tech; in fact they are now doing house flipping. However, they embodied this 'success personality' quite explicitly. I can definitely relate to hosting parties with mixed moods. Over time you realize you have to host multiple kinds of events - this is more maintainable for having multiple kinds of friendships. I have friends who can be comfortable in any event I might have, but it is best to find those naturally rather than during awkward parties
Yeah me too, my childhood friends are all still struggling financially (early 30s now). After a few years in tech I can finally afford vacations like Europe or lazing in Hawaii. My friends still view a vacation as driving to another friends house in a different state and crashing on their couch for a couple days. I don't want my vacation to be sleeping on a couch in a room with 3 other people.
I'm not sure why there would even be a gradual drift? My friends who aren't in tech are generally my most fun and interesting friends. We play D&D, we have dinner or drinks at each other's houses, we talk about anime and music and video games, we play with each other's dogs.
The only version of this I have experienced is the one where my non-tech friends are being forced out of my city via skyrocketing housing prices, which are largely due to - you guessed it - tech. It's upsetting, but there's little I can do about it except trying to keep in touch over distance.
Do you own a house in that city? If so, you would suddenly have a ton of house ownership problems your friends can't relate to. It is those sorts of things I am referring to
I can't help that one of my most active chats right now is speculative investing, and it simply is not a game for e.g. people with high rate debt
Then what about making someone feel shitty for describing your day? That you took a day off due to stress, and you remind them of their unchecked mental health crisis? I'm not saying you can't be a good friend through this, but that you need to be a good friend through this. This makes it much more doable with long-time friends rather than new people who you subconsciously pick as being like you
Sure, I guess those things just don't come up as much (and I will admit I intentionally avoid talking about certain subjects). But I wouldn't say that gradually erodes the friendship; we just relate over different things.
I don't actually have that much overlap with my friends in the first place.
We just have a select few common interests and enjoy each other's company.
I have a different circle of friends for most interests, there's not even any overlap between the ones I online game with or dirtbike with. Hell there's not even overlap between the dirtbike friends and street riding friends. I have interests that aren't shared with any of them.
Buying a house in the city is just adding another interest to the pile of interests that only apply randomly to a small fraction of my friends.
It doesn't have to be a problem, however sharing fewer interests is what I meant by 'gradual drift'. Someone I share 0 interests with that also doesn't just enjoy my company I will eventually interact less and less with. If you keep multiple diverse friend groups, you're definitely less prone to this issue
Personally, I'm reacting negatively because it feels like she says she does all these things that I do, and that nearly everyone in nearly every office I've worked in does. And she uses it to draw a contrast between herself and us. So to me all but a couple items read as "I knew I was different because I do this thing that nearly everyone does."
Maybe I'm in a weird lucky tech bubble where I've gotten to have a whole career that's mostly devoid of the people she's drawing a contrast against, but I've worked at a pretty disparate variety of jobs, and my experience seems to ring true with a lot of other commenters too.
Maybe I'm just having a kneejerk reaction because the last articles I read this morning were "silicon valley and californians are bad/clueless," and I'm reading that into this when it's not intended subtext.
Some people enjoy having their heartstrings tugged. Others don’t. What causes people to feel sympathy differs from person to person. I remember reading some tweet from Chrissy Teigen before she stopped tweeting complaining about a restaurant serving her a $10,000 bottle of wine without mentioning the price when she asked for something that went well with her dish. Not my kind of problem but it annoyed her. No doubt there are Americans from generational wealth who could write about their discomfort dealing with Brits of similar status in Britain, not knowing all the correct shibboleths. People feel alienated all the time, everywhere. I felt alienated from my classmates all through primary and secondary school. I got to university and found my people. Not fitting in and figuring out how to fit in is a really common experience. Right now there’s some black kid who’s really, really into metal going to his first live gig and he’s feeling awkward because he doesn’t know anyone and when he does he’ll pronounce something wrong or say cool instead of based or something. There’s an American kid at his first day at a school in Britain who’s going to get called a Yank. There’s a leftist kid going to his first demonstration who’s going to get called a TERF. This is a thing that happens.
I would go so far as to say that some people have learned to think of having their heartstrings tugged as a prelude to attempted exploitation. I know that years in the Bay taught me that.
You're absolutely right. People are not reacting the way you had hoped. They are reacting by questioning the assertions in the article in ways that don't engage with the author's fundamental humanity. They are treating it like an alien artifact reflecting on a far-off culture.
What if readers came in, reacted with warmth and kindness and empathy and compassion, and engaged with the article in a way that validated the author's experiences while perhaps gently questioning the article's conclusions? Would that be cold?
Or would the abject failure to reflect when confronted with key truths from the life of a real person make you sick to your stomach?
Thanks for the considered reply. I don’t think it would be cold and I don’t think I would have such a visceral reaction. I think the offhand tone implies a kind of misplaced confidence and shutting down of conversation - almost contempt - which is not a good way to start a conversation.
You're completely right. The offhand tone many have adopted is how they might react to a purely technical piece, rather than someone's genuine pain exposed to their view. It would, after all, not be wildly out of place to react to a technically detailed root cause analysis document by questioning some of its assertions that struck readers as overreaching.
For my own part, when I find myself reacting to someone's tone I sometimes find it valuable to pause and consider why they would adopt it. It can help me separate the other person's tone from the real, valid, lived experience that is my internal emotional reaction.
Empathy cannot just be a thing I demand of others.
That makes sense. Regarding your final sentence - I guess I felt that for me it’s been the other way round. I feel that in most HN discussions I had silently been empathetic and not demanded any level of empathy from anyone, and clearly that was not going to work in this instance.
My key has been to engage my empathy for everyone concerned. To read an article and engage my empathy for the author and the pain some know all too well is a necessary step. Yet to assume that all other readers will do the same is perhaps a opportunity to engage in empathy for them and how different their lives might have been.
I find I'm often surprised by the actions and reactions of people I have put minimal effort into empathizing with. Sometimes I find their unexpected warmth welcoming, or their callous coldness a sickening contrast.
Some - like myself - have a learned aversion to anything that tries too hard and too overtly to tug on my heartstrings.
I seem to run into more and more responses like this these days. Instead of responding to any specific comment a person has written, it attempts to paint any differing opinion as being somehow immoral. I can't say that this type of approach is conducive to open discussion.
I summarised a bunch of comments. If you have an issue with my summary you can critique it directly, just like you wanted me to do. To me they don’t look like differing opinions that have been thought through. They seem like kneejerk dismissals, which are against the HN rules.
Sure, if you want me to got into more detail, I'm happy to oblige. To me the whole first paragraph seems to be simply dismissive, painting different opinions as incorrect and immoral, talking about how surprised you are that the comments are so cold, that people aren't holding a mirror up to their own behavior, that this depresses you and that "we can do better":
> Many of the comments on this article are so cold. I can’t believe it. When I read the original article I was imagining all the constructive ways HN readers would interpret it and hold a mirror up to their own behaviour. Some commenters are doing this. But it surprises and depresses me how many people are commenting saying “no, this list isn’t what it says it is, it’s a list showing the author has a negative mindset / is not from the Valley bubble, and that problem can be fixed by just getting over it.”. We can do better than that.
I don't see any engagement (in the first paragraph or subsequent ones) with the opinions of the comments (and if I missed them, feel free to point them out), or any effort to entertain the notion that they could have a point.
There used to be a big problem online where people wouldn't consider other people's opposing views. But we seem to have reached the point where people are upset that people even have views that are different from our own.
I don't think it's "immoral" [your word] or "incorrect" [your word] to have a knee-jerk reaction. It's a fact of life. I see that my statement has landed on you as a critique of morality or some kind of discussion-suppressing wokeness, but that's really not what I wanted, so I apologise.
The phrase I used - "we can do better" - was not meant to mean "I think these replies are incorrect [your word] and immoral [your word]" but that we can do a better analysis. A DEEPER analysis which requires BOTH the knee-jerk dismissal and the interrogation of that dismissal. I don't think it's morally wrong but yes, it is depressing TO ME. I'm not saying other opinions should be banned. I'm not even saying those comments shouldn't have been posted. I guess I'm saying they should have been longer and more considered and frankly less rude!
OK, let me write up my engagement with the other comments. I do agree with the possibility of cultural differences being responsible for some of the things in the post. I also agree that to some extent the "negative mindset" criticism is in some way valid, because growing up poor DOES give you a negative mindset. But the essence of my comment was that really the substance of those comments was missing the main point. There's a 1500 word article there with someone's actual experiences - a valuable outside perspective on part of tech and corporate culture. Even if one doesn't relate to the article and think it's wrong, one can say "Hmm... this doesn't fit with my experience." leaving the door open to the fact that one hasn't experienced that particular life, rather than just further marginalising the author by acting as if they have just magically generated 1500 words of "wrong".
It's one of those articles you either relate to or don't and if you don't, you're going to pick up on the flaws. Not everyone that fails to relate will complain about those flaws, but any article designed to evoke emotions - as this one is - will inevitably stir up irritation in some, and those so stirred will complain about them.
Written differently, but with the same message, it would carry more people with it, but then maybe those that related would relate less well, so maybe that would be a net loss.
I CAN relate because I grew up poor, have a GED, have student loans because my parents didn't pay for my education, live in a poorer area than my coworkers, have a really old phone, worried about bothering potential mentors, don't fit in at the gym, relish bonuses, overeat free food because it's free (pre-covid), talk to janitors, was paid less than colleagues, etc. and yet I still find her sentiment negative, classist, self-victimizing, and unhelpful.
In my opinion, this comes off as shaming privileged people for their privilege. She could probably say a lot about the hard work and lucky breaks she's had that have helped her advance in spite of her challenges, but instead she focuses exclusively on her disadvantages.
I attribute most of my social mobility to a ton of lucky breaks. Some people aren't as fortunate, and there's a lot to be said about that, but I don't think this article advances that conversation.
Why do you think it's negative? It isn't a piece diagnosing the roots of inequality, and it doesn't pretend to be. It isn't a piece about "how I got here", and it shouldn't have to be. It's a piece about the weird aspects of not having a very, very specific background in tech, and her internal experience of those. It's not "here let me lay out the Nature Of The Thing Universally". I don't understand why you're holding it accountable to "advancing the conversation" about social mobility.
I think it's negative because I think it focuses on the negative. It's just my opinion and my opinion can be like the author's—my interpretation of something based on my experiences. And it certainly doesn't have to advance the conversation or be about how "she got here", but I wish it would have because I think that would've been more useful. I'm OK if we disagree.
I was primarily responding to the parent who intimated those irritated by it can't relate. I was irritated and CAN relate. That was my primary point.
> In my opinion, this comes off as shaming privileged people for their privilege.
I don't understand where do you see shaming. Even in points I think fit me, where I am rich person, I did not felt shamed at all. In points where I could relate to her, I did not perceived myself as victim.
> she focuses exclusively on her disadvantages.
Most of points don't compare her to others in a sense of gaining advantages or disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage was salary one and there the complain is mixed with her own behavior that helped situation to happen.
> She could probably say a lot about the hard work and lucky breaks she's had that have helped her advance in spite of her challenges
She could also write about drawing or socializing with buddies. Not everything have to be forced into "how I succeeded admire me" framework. Sometimes people write about other things.
Yep, she can write about whatever she wants. Some people like it, I thought it was unhelpful. I wish it were something else and you're glad it isn't. Cool.
I mostly wanted to say I can relate AND didn't like it, responding to the parent.
This doesn't surprise me one bit. Tech is just another white collar country club. The rules are just slightly different than the bankers country club and the surgeons country club and the lawyer's country club.
If you're not one of the people who typically joins that kind of club you can hack it but you won't feel like you belong or you might but it will take you many years.
Definitely not my experience, if for no other reason than the overwhelming portion that I know or have worked with is not white, was not born in this country (regardless of which country we’re talking about/in at the time), and I only know 1-2 with any sort of real social connections in the area they now live and work in. They haven’t done as well over the years as most, but there are outliers of course (Bill G being one prominent one of course).
Also no real generational tendencies (I only know 1 or 2 folks with parents in any sort of engineering or computer discipline), unlike doctors or the like.
One counter point, which is the defining feature of tech imho, is you don't need to be born into it. Its difficult to become a doctor without prepping years or more ahead of even applying. You can break into tech at basically any point in your life, it just takes time (as you said) and effort. And of course, interest will make it more enjoyable / tolerable. Its not a perfectly egalitarian club, but it is certainly _more_ so than any of those other professions, by a few orders of magnitude.
Soooooo much of this article is relatable to me. I remember my first office job, I couldn't snap myself out of the habit of asking my boss for a break to go to the bathroom. He finally said "You don't need to ask me, just go, jeez." I was just so used to jobs where you had to ask.
The time clock thing too! To this day, the back of my mind still wonders if I punched in and whether all my hours are being counted. Can't just walk away from those habits once internalized.
The culture difference is so real. I remember sitting in a meeting with a bunch of managers just a little higher on the totem pole than me. Not executives by any stretch. And they were all complaining about their taxes, the cost of private school for their kids, and the fact that they can't find a good second nanny. I'm just sitting there thinking "If I lose this job, I'm living in my car." Really hard to consider these guys my peers, and I know that affects my work and my working relationship with them.
So the article resounded with me, because being raised by my grandparents on a family citrus farm during the transition thru the NAFTA years and watching my family loose what little land wealth they had. It left an indelible mark, a mark of insecurity and fear and it lead to behavior like this.
I remember one time, when I just started out in tech, I went to an interview for a group that was contracting for NASA, the interview went very well, they loved me, the team loved me. I pretty much had the job. The team liked me so much that they invited me to lunch. I declined, you could tell the temperature changed at that very moment that I did. I did not get the job, and in retrospect I should have just told them I am not in the position to pay for a meal out at this time. I had literally put my last pennies into the tank of my car to get to that interview.
Anyways, I back story that, to say this; I did well in the industry, I have exited a few companies and I have held some pretty impressive titles at some pretty big orgs but I never got rich. Some of that had to do with dragging my family out of poverty but some of it had to do with something else. I helped build a startup and we sold that startup for a good deal of money. I received a pittance because I did not know my value. It was enough to take off some of life's stresses but it was not FU money. I went to work for one of the companies that we had a B2B relationship with that was a downstream provider to the company we sold. Anyways it was here that things changed for me, and it was not because of me or my work. It was because the CEO of that company became my personal friend. Her name was Sheila and she told me something that I had never heard before and that was this.
She told me that I was what she calls institutionally poor. That I had been conditioned thru my childhood to think like a poor person and in doing so you send out unconscious signals to others. She told me this because she came up similar. She told me that it causes you to over analyze and over estimate risk and therefore you will not take the bold moves that people that don't have to worry do. That while you can change the world and everyone see it. If you hold onto the fear on needing your safety net under you, that you will never extract your true value from other. So I said, so you are going to pay me my fair value, she laughed and said no, I got you for a very good deal. 3 Days latter I walked into her office, with my resignation letter and told her I had an offer from another company. She said, now you get it, how much did they offer. I told her, and she said I will double that if you stay. That was when I learned a tangential lesson, and that is sometimes hard ass, ball busters are the best people.
Point being there is a piece of this, that the person that grew up poor has to break themselves free of and many times they don't even know what they need to free themselves of and that is thinking like a poor person.
Great story, helps me see the profound effect that such stresses put on a person.
I got another clue out of it. That 'personal friend' was a user, a manipulator, a predator, and preyed upon folks like us. She must have felt something personal toward you else she'd never have said what she did and given up the raw deal she pushed over on you. To threaten to quit and get offered double - that's a situation to run from as fast as you can. Get double from the next person, but never, ever work for such a person as that again. That's my take anyway.
I don't see it that way, she was a friend, she built a company from the ground up and she took care of people. At that time (2002ish IIRC) she was paying me fair market rate which in full disclosure was about $150k USD a year. She knew my worth, she was trying to teach it to me. She saw me build the other company and she saw that I did not extract my value from that deal. She paid me what I asked for when she called me after the exit of the other company and that is the point, I did not ask for more. She needed me to fix her companies technical problems, she knew I could do it and I did, she knew my value, I did not. She came to me in need, and "I" asked for market rate, because I was not working due to the exit and was worried about burning up the small safety net I had just acquired. She was a friend in tilting her hand. Had she just told me you don't make enough here, here is some money. I would not have learned the lesson that she wanted me to learn as a friend.
When that happened I was annoyed, I went and interviewed and I asked for as much as I thought I could get. I had never interviewed when I did not need a job, it was the first time I has ever interviewed without a sword over my head and I had to do that to learn the lesson that she knew she could not teach me, but was in the position to nudge me into. She was stupid rich, it did not hurt her one bit to pay me double, the key was I never asked for it, because I thought like a poor man. Money was very valuable to me, to her it was an afterthought as compared to the important things she needed accomplished.
When you are poor, money and the retention of it, is the bottom line. When you are rich it is not. It is a factor, a rich person is not going to go into a bad deal and loose money intentionally but in her case she was loosing millions in lost opportunity. Had I asked for $500k, her mind would have still been on the Millions is lost opportunity, not the $500k it will take to pursue it. It is as simple as that.
I'm trying to understand this. The part where you were saying that you were underpaid and being paid a pittance of what you were worth, that was making $150k in 2002? My understanding is that this is a strong mid-high salary for an engineer even today 19 years of inflation later. Could you clarify what you mean by all of this?
I was brought on to the other company as a CTO, they where a profitable startup but had used contractors and had a bad tech stack due to no internal technical direction. I entered her company as a consultant and interim CTO. While I did do hands on development work, I had a track record of rescuing companies with good business models, but where hampered by their technology and technical debt.
Her entire company was running on a legacy system that the vendor who was a small custom software shop, had abandoned and who was not interested in selling the source code to anyone (think Computer Associates on a small scale), The owner had done well and was just bleeding the contracts he had until they ran out. While he sailed around the world.
So she was locked into a system that had no path to add features. I had to reverse engineer this system to get to the data, get it out of the underlining datastore it was using and into a proper DBMS, as well as architect a solution to synchronize data between the two while we implemented critical features they needed in a new system, while strangling out functionality of the old system. Then hire pretty mush an entire development team from the ground up to do this (fortunately I knew a few developers that had just lost their job due to their company selling). She was looking to sell her company at top dollar and this system was costing her opportunity on that front.
So while I was doing development, I was not just a engineer I was 27 years old, I was in charge of and navigating the technical direction of a multi-million dollar company.
The reality was the other company was an exit north of $50 million dollars. I got a check for $125k and told to have a nice life. Because I did not negotiate an exit package in the event of a sale. I believed the VC's when they said this was a long haul venture, they where not looking to take it public and where not looking to exit. They where not silicon valley VC's and had more of a background in large real estate deals. So most of their ventures where long hold investments. There is a lot more to that story. 911 happened and hit the industry it was in hard and I think they changed that viewpoint at that time, but I did not shield myself from that reality.
The point is, the sale would have never happened had I not joined the company. Had I extracted my real worth I would have walked out of that exit with about 2 million dollars. Like the COO and the VP of Sales did. She saw all of that happen and she knew the reason I did not and it was because even though I was doing well, I still thought like a poor person.
The bottom line is that neither company would have sold for the sticker prices that they did, had I not entered those companies and navigated them out of their bad technical direction. There are certainly other people that could have done it, but I had a proven track record of doing it. I was a sure bet, thinking like a poor man made me price myself on the market by what my hands can do in an hour and not see myself as a product, a product that reduces risk and risk reduction has value.
To get deeper into the story, this company was involved in hotel allotments and was a central hub for them. Think of something akin to a commodities market for hotel rooms. One of the things that they really needed to be able to do was provide their allotments in real time to online vendors, something that they could not do. So they where basically packaging up an ETL every day and sending it to them. Within a month of me being with the company we had the data sync up and running and had web services on top of the new DB to provide real-time allotment. We brought Travelocity and Expedia online first and our revenues skyrocketed. When I signed on with the company she made me an offer that I could get a take of every booking that was done thru the web services we where going to build, if I could get this system up and running, but that would be my compensation. No base salary, just a take of every booking. I declined because I was risk adverse and wanted to hold on to what I had. She said this was the moment she knew that I was holding myself back.
Think of it this way, imagine that I came up with an algorithm that could predict the next lottery numbers. I was calculating my labor of how long it took to create the algorithm as it's value and not the fact that it could net millions in winnings. If I had that magical algorithm I could certainly sell it for 50% of the next purse. I was selling it for the man hours I put into making it and when she said, hey I will buy the ticket and give you a cut, I was like no, I want money now and that is how a poor person thinks.
You are right, I was making great money for my age and the era but even with all that and even though I was doing great my earning potential was being hampered by the the way I thought.
Finally I will leave you with this. I grew up not far from Palm Beach. Many places have the other side of the tracks we have the other side of the bridge. I had very rich friends in High School and I remember they would take me to dinner with their family at really nice restaurants. I remember being at those dinners and thinking one day, I swear I am going to earn enough to take my grandparents to dinners like this because it was so nice. No one having to serve, everybody just getting to sit there and talk and enjoy each others company. That was literally my only goal of wealth in life and that is how a poor person thinks. That was the good life to me, going to a restaurant. That was my measure of made it.
Who do you think would NOT be a ‘predator’ in that situation exactly?
Sounds like she offered insight and a 2nd chance to someone she thought would benefit from it, and then helped them build on it in a way that stuck.
Should she have been offering more than they thought they were worth? Who would that benefit? It would likely just cause anxiety and imposter syndrome.
That’s avoiding the whole issue of someone who knows what they’re worth and is able to stand up and ask for it is worth more than someone who does not or will not. To everyone.
You have a much more sunny view of HN readers than I do; I was expecting to see a whole bunch of victim-blaming and complete lack of understanding of what it's like to be broke. I was delightedly surprised to see your comment as the top one when I looked.
Introspection is expensive, and recognizing that behaviors that benefit you personally cause undesirable damage in someone else can be the most expensive of all.
Most people will actively avoid it, it just makes their existence harder for no concrete benefit to them.
As someone who was very por growing up and worked their ass off to become who I am today, everything she said is 100% true of being poor and not an artifact of a bad attitude. If anything, the fact she sees the opportunities for free lunches and tampons shows she's actaulyl got a GOOD attitude and is resourceful. All of those things are indicative of an observant, hard worker.
> you can't buy your way out of the mindset, or snap your fingers / empty the cache / cycle the power the way the average HN commenter seems to think you can.
Reading the list, most of them are pretty harmless if not annoying. But one struck me as something completely different:
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was afraid to seek mentorship from anyone above me, convinced that even asking would seem like bothersome begging. I watched the people around me network effortlessly, assured of favors and good words put in. I could only think in terms of what I could offer and how I could survive; they were thinking on the next level where they never had to wonder if they were good enough. They were to the business-class manner born, at least.
Seaweed Snack vs Cheetos is a class thing, and maybe cultural (I could see people of East-Asians origins reaching for the seaweed more than the Cheetos).
But not being able to get help or mentoring and to network is an enormous barrier to career progression.
The author is complaining of being poor and talking about a lifestyle that her coworkers enjoy that I, who am quite well off, can't afford either. That doesn't make her poor, it makes her not wealthy.
While I'm sure if I met her in person I'd feel very sympathetic, it is difficult to read about someone being unhappy because they can't take a 3-day holiday in Greece; can't collect antiquities or be driven to work by a chauffeur every day. These are not goals I'm sympathetic with either.
I honestly don't care if someone is poor in relative terms to their co-workers either. I'm only interested in what my coworkers earn in the first place because it strengthens my bargaining position.
I guess the unfortunate reality is that many of the people who engage in the behaviors that make people feel isolated go on the defensive when the harmfulness of their behavior is highlighted.
>Many of the comments on this article are so cold. I can’t believe it. When I read the original article I was imagining all the constructive ways HN readers would interpret it and hold a mirror up to their own behaviour.
Why expect that though? Many of the HN readers are exactly the out-of-touch persons criticized in the article.
It unfortunately seems that many people in the tech world are very pro-capitalism and defensive of their own wealth. The attitude seems to boil down to "I got mine" with little to no consideration of others. Specifically, as regulation begins to intensify in the tech sphere, there's this feeling of people coming for their piece of the pie.
Which seems pretty far from the point, but those people could view this as just another attack on their estate. They might feel like they deserve it, and deserve to act that way. This article highlights the ugly side, where someone who isn't already indoctrinated into that elitism is rubbing shoulders with the type who are used to the privilege available to those of us with longer running tech careers. And it looks bad. So in response, I suppose it inspires those people to circle the wagons and just accuse the author or not getting theirs effectively enough.
I'm complaining about what I wrote in the comment. It wasn't the top comment when I wrote it. That happened after I wrote it. It got a lot of upvotes so I guess people who agree with me were more comfortable upvoting/replying after I wrote it than commenting before me. Maybe because they knew that the comment would attract criticism like yours
Is the complain still relevant now that you have the most votes? To me it seems like HN loves to agree with people whom it thinks are shunned by HN, but in reality you are the voice of HN. Again, as evidenced here after a few minutes of posting your comment.
I suppose it's become an unfortunate header for any comments agreeing with the article. I've never had a comment "succeed" in this fashion before so I wasn't prepared for the decontextualisation. If I could write it again, I would simply write how my experience seems to back up the experience in the article, and miss out my angry meta-commentary.
I've noticed this trend lately on HN of people digging through user history to make some meta commentary about the poster. It's weird. This isn't reddit. Let the statement speak on its' own regardless of who posted it or why.
"Three paychecks is a month and a half of income (rent and two car payments by my fevered calculations, which never stop)"
Pay attention to those last three words. This is very important. I've been on both sides too, and to me those words are like a slap in the face: stark reality.
If you're poor enough (relative to the costs of your life) you are at a constant exhausting deficit because you CANNOT stop calculating and recalculating the mechanisms of your basic survival. Even if you're not juggling bills and having to gauge what will blow up worst, you're projecting worst-case scenarios and trying to plan against adverse situations, which will come up more often for you (example: old car problems)
"which never stop"
Consider those words seriously. You can improve the quality and performance of a person a great deal by allowing them to function as they 'normally' would, rather than in constant emergency mode.
I noticed where the writer found out they were the lowest paid person.
This is how the wealthy class really keep people from moving up. Your pay is forever tied to what you used to make. It's hard enough to break the circuit in your mind, it's near impossible to do so with your employer.
At my current employer, they offered me a 10% paycut to convert from contract to FTE. I could not afford that, but I also can't afford to be out of work. I pushed back gently and eventually agreed to converting at the same rate. I knew other people in the same job were making at least $10k more.
The next guy to convert, was able to negotiate harder and I believe he ended up with a higher rate, despite making less then me as a contractor. He used the knowledge of my pay (and my name) to negotiate, which I would never do to someone, since I started at the bottom. This impacted my relationship with my boss.
The company did later give me a pay correction of about 5%, after 2 other team members quit for higher paying jobs. One of whom was making more then me and one who was probably making less.
>> Your pay is forever tied to what you used to make.
It's not just a psychological "avoid the subject" kind of trick. They literally refuse to give you raises no matter what. In my last job, I was likely the top developer in the company (the company had hundreds of millions of $ of runway just sitting there) and I was putting constant pressure on my boss for a raise and promotion for years (they even admitted that I was one of their top devs). Instead of trying to give me a good deal, the CTO snapped and threatened me with violence - The next day, I continued the discussion and was still pushing forward with my demands (threatening to quit) and they refused to give me anything at all. I had a nervous breakdown right there (first time ever in my entire career) and I ended up rage-quitting (it got to shouting and personal insults).
The only reason I took things this far was because I thought the system would finally yield some rewards once I showed enough initiative and ambition (backed by years of hard work and delivering great results). It didn't.
The system is completely rigged. It's an illusion that there is any kind of meritocracy. Once you really buy into all the "you control your own destiny" rhetoric and start to push yourself and others beyond the limits you thought you were capable of (when you start to impress people with your skills and ambition), you realize that it achieves nothing. It's all a big show.
"It's all a big club, and you ain't in it" - George Carlin
I only realized a bit later in my career: If you ask for more and they refuse then bail out. You can nearly always get a raise just by moving companies so find one that rewards your efforts. My current employer is the first place I have felt like my achievements were appreciated and the appreciation resulted in financial rewards. I barely had to ask, let alone beg or fight for it.
Yeah, nobody gives raises anymore. The only place ever got raises, they were tied to a union contract that just happened to benefit me (a non-member). Every other place would give bonuses or 1% "raises" that didn't cover the increased insurance costs. Pay scales were only used to hold down salary, "we can't bring you in at the top of the pay scale".
I changed companies 15 times in 15 years (changed countries 4 times) so I'm familiar with this phenomenon. It seems so artificial. Like a scheme. I would definitely have changed companies fewer times and wouldn't have left the country if I could just have been paid what I was worth.
It sounds like you took a particularly closed off and insular view of the ‘you control your own destiny’ meaning.
You left - you took control. You didn’t take control early enough however it sounds like, and started interviewing and looking for better options before losing emotional control and exploding.
You could have done that at any time. We often close off our own options and don’t really look to pursue things due to perceived risk, lack of experience, etc.
If you’d come in with a resignation letter, you might have walked out with a raise - and for sure either way had a better deal. If you’re not willing to walk away, you’re never really properly negotiating - you’re asking for favors.
The more you’re able and willing to walk away, the more of a real negotiation it is.
It can take decades to save up the capital necessary to be in this position. Some people have it by nature of who they were born from. It is what is is.
If you push yourself beyond the bounds of the expected, one good thing happens. Other companies are more willing to hire you.
Pay rises happened to me several times. Promotions within the same company, never. The way to step up, as on a proper stairway, is to also step forward.
Based on what I've heard and my own experience, raises are a pittance anyways. You have to change jobs.
My manager did the opposite, praised me for being the top dev, gave me a 7% raise, said that's the max they could give anyone, asked me not to tell the others.
The problem with being "the top dev" is there's no one to learn from, so I started looking for other opportunities anyways.
Never mentioned my old salary, and new company offered me 50% more.
And when salary comes up in general conversation the new company frequently mentions apologetically that they're a smaller company who can't afford to pay as much as others.
Raises cap out here at 6% if you're absolutely phenomenal.
I worked for at least 15 companies (of all different kinds) over 15 years and the last time I worked with a developer who was smarter than me was 5 years ago. I've been working nights and weekends on open source projects too so I think I must be near the top in terms of skills... But somehow that doesn't translate to even moderate financial success. I find myself more alone and less appreciated than ever in spite of the fact that I've never been more performant, sharper and more knowledgeable.
I can deliver extremely high quality projects (in very complex areas) at an unparalleled speed and can turn a team of junior developers into 10x developers but nobody cares and many less experienced developers disagree with my approach in spite of the fact that I keep proving them wrong over and over.
To give an idea; I've build a blockchain ecosystem in 1 year for $0 (only paid in the new crypto before it had value)... My closest competitor has been working torwards the same thing for 5 years and it cost them at least $20 million.
Companies thrive (or die) off the difference between their costs and the amount they can get paid by customers.
There are many unscrupulous bosses that will use underhanded tricks to convince people to take less pay to help widen that margin. In my experience it is ultimately self defeating and results in lower quality people staying. In the short term, it is amazing what people can be convinced to accept (been there when I was younger). It’s also amazing what people can feel entitled too beyond the economics of a situation.
I’m glad you’ve been making some inroads.
Step 1 is fixing the ‘I can’t afford to be out of work’ part - it puts you in an incredibly disadvantaged negotiating position. You’re holding yourself hostage essentially.
Sometimes this is purely psychological (been there). Everything is so stressful it’s too overwhelming to look. It’s worth figuring out a way to get the emotional space there, or you’ll always be stuck.
Sometimes it’s already insufficient pay, in which case figuring out a way to interview for the higher paying job or get credentials for a better role is the best way forward. Sometimes partnerships with others to help save on costs (a classic traditional reason for marriage and cohabitation) can be really good for everyone.
I've had to change jobs in the past. A sudden job loss would be difficult; but I would have moved on if they hadn't given me the adjustment. I'm still getting offers that are similar to my new pay. Once I spun up my jobs network it takes awhile to spin back down.
I'm not a hard negotiator and I frankly don't want to be. I prefer to give a little when I can, and I'll just move on if I feel I'm being abused. There are too many other opportunities to stick around where you don't feel appreciated.
I’m glad you’re not actually that on the edge - I hope you believe it when push comes to shove and don’t forget.
In many cases, not feeling valued means you’re not getting the value you could be - and that can literally be millions of dollars over a career difference.
> The next guy to convert, was able to negotiate harder and I believe he ended up with a higher rate
This is why salary negotiations are inherently unfair* (and salary info does get around even in companies that try to keep it secret -- if it's fair who cares if it gets around?)
* unfair because of an asymmetry: a hiring manager with any experience will have a higher n in negotiating hires than any employee will have negotiating their own comp. Also unfair because it pays for more for a skill not needed in most jobs (negotiating a feature in or out of a codebase is not the same thing). It is fair when the job calls for it (e.g. CEO or a VP of Business Development)
Don’t ever tell a new company how much you currently make. And if you’re not looking for a new company, you’re selling yourself short. Of course the current company isn’t going to give much; why would they?
Everyone here is talking about it like the company owes you something. They don’t owe you anything. And it goes both ways: you don’t owe them. So get out on the job market and get yourself what you’re worth.
Company doesn't owe me, but needs to meet my expectations of they want me to stick around. I'm always surprised when companies can't understand their high turnover.
I’ve been extremely lucky moving to the Bay Area to be someone who has not failed. I grew up poor. Today, I have enough money for rent and bills, I still think and worry about them. The endless what if’s are a lifetime long curse, and there is no cure.
No, it's that you don't have enough margin (possibly because your lifestyle expanded to keep pace with your resources?)
My parents died. They'd been sitting on property and had never tried to 'featherbed' their kids' experience, so we all grew up THINKING total failure was an option. I survived until I was over 50, very much living constantly with less than $1000 in the bank and a roof over my head (one exception to the latter, but it didn't last long)
I went, at a stroke, from that, to more than $100k in the bank (quite a bit has now been turned into equipment for my work, but not all)
If you have enough money to go for a YEAR with everything else collapsed and gone to zero… as in, however lush or humble your lifestyle, you lose all means of income, but it'll taka a year for you to burn through all your money and have none left… and then you have not lost your normal income after all… that would probably shut off the 'what ifs'.
It's a margin thing. You can continue to keep track, you can continue to fill out your checkbook and all that, but if your margin is roughly a year before you're in serious danger then you will probably not burn extra cycles worrying about your finances. And if you do, the therapy to straighten that out won't be super hard.
I bet you 'enough money for rent and bills' means you can always pay them, not that you've got 12 times that amount socked away. I absolutely wouldn't have ever had that except that my parents literally died and left it to me. I don't design my life to squirrel away 12x more money than I will ever need. I think it's unhealthy, though obviously my folks did something of that nature to create the situation.
Mindfulness, treatment/therapy, etc. can go a really, really long way though. Speaking as someone who’s been there.
Investing in yourself is absolutely key. It’s something most folks from our background have been taught to not even attempt. Not doing it just reinforces the cycle.
That phrase "emergency mode" really hits home the underlying mental mode that drives an understanding of the situation.
It only takes a few trigger words or phrases to take us back to past trauma and difficulties, like the tremors before an earthquake.
I have first-hand experience of the "caste" system that can emerge in tech environments. It was my experience that our colleagues in the lower caste told scare stories (and you see the odd firing/letting go early to feel they are real) and you feel distant from the "upper" caste. But actual factual reality in my specific experience was a basically fair system with strong accountability. I was grateful, and benefitted from the experience overall. It is hard in such environments to "be normal" because the primitive part of the brain is in "fear mode". That part of the brain actually makes the most important decisions in your life.
What is the way through? My opinion is to try and make honest real connection at a human level with your colleagues but that is actually hard to do. That is why the part of the story I found most painful was the comment about "bleached cotton". It was a delicate moment where friendship could have started but was cut off.
Lastly, I thought it was an endearing turn of phrase to first introduce the engineer as someone from Harvard. And then later refer to the person as "Harvard" (instead of the engineer's actual name or some pronoun).
The last sentence struck a cord with me. Emergency-mode doesn't just have to do with money. Asking for constant status updates on projects has the same effect. I don't understand why some companies force this on employees/teams.
Coming from a country in constant economic crisis, thinking of what ifs all the time is the way of living, then moving to a 1st world country life suddenly enters easy mode, as you know problems in a 1st world country won't ever be as bad as what you used to know, and since you are used to having issues, budgeting and saving become easier.
A lot of the things the author mentioned, I would also do, just because I don't see the point of wasting money if they are offered for free, and saying hello to the cleaning crew is just basic human decency, c'mon.
Also, the paycheck stuff, anyone who has ever cared about money would throw a fit if the money is not in their account the next day, from what I gather all the author's coworkers never had an issue in their life.
Tl;dr Poor people (and racial and ethnic minorities, and women, and queer folk) are not dumb. They just have to turn their equal cognitive resources towards things other (and more fundamental to survival) than their magnum opus/business idea/etc. Those who overcome this are HIGHLY effective, but it's not fair that we ask it of them. That's not how an effective or efficient or just society runs, and we leave money on the table and room for any adversaries we might have to maneuver when we doom whole classes of people to constant, pervasive desperation.
Can you blame the author for being overweight and not wanting to put up with feeling self-conscious at the gym? Being poor can push you to your limits even just trying to survive every day, not to mention be an effective worker, and being a good parent/spouse/partner/friend/family/etc to whoever is in your life. Doing 45 minutes of cardio while also feeling like an outsider is just not in the time or energy budget.
And when you worry about the possibility of someday not being able to afford food due to some extend unemployment episode, when you feel vulnerable any time you hear the word "recession" on the news, it is hard to convince your body not to eat as much as possible now, while food is abundant.
I recommend the book Scarcity for anyone interested in learning more about the psychology behind this. It was written Mullainathan and Shafir, both stars in their respective fields.
You do realize that men are more often victims of violent attacks and murders than women? Many (most?) of us are always vigilant for signs of potential violence, particularly when surrounded by groups of seemingly violent and/or armed people.
I had a great education/CV early in my career, and had the opportunity to interview at some of the top most companies prior to their IPO (some when they were tiny companies). Google, Facebook, Stripe and maybe 3 more that went on to be billion dollar exits. I screwed up every single time. Either I did not take the interview seriously, or took a more prestigious academic job compared to the start up opportunity. Talk about being in the right place, at the right time and still missing out. I have barely paid off a small fraction of my starter home (no longer in the Bay area). I really wonder if it is just luck or more complex than that. (Good) Luck got me the right opportunity,but it can't just be (Bad) luck that snatched away all those opportunities from materializing? Clear, I made extremely bad decisions, missed out on the greatest wealth creation event in history, and must live with this till my end.
Edit. There is a rich-dad, poor-dad point I'd like to make. My parents were extremely bad with investments and not very educated. This made me chase the higher prestige academic jobs as opposed to the lucrative startups. Also, when my white friends (with moderately-rich parents) were buying houses at 5% down, I said they were crazy and I was paying off 5% interest education loans, saving up for a bigger down-payment, buying my car for cash, etc. My parents went through the days of 20% interest and never understood the power of leverage. They passed on risk-aversion to me. Even now, I understand the power of leverage, but am still scared to use it.
I like the phrase "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity". So when you say you made bad decisions, didn't take it seriously, etc. it sounds like you recognize your own culpability in creating bad "luck".
There is something to be said for overcoming the inertia of the (bad) ideas we may have been raised with. Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outliers how wealthy parent raise their children to be more assertive. One of his examples was a "genius" child with a 195 IQ who couldn't reach his goal of a PhD because of the ingrained passivity his parent taught him, which caused him to accept limitations he was told without questioning. To that extent, if we can't overcome those bad ideas, we're creating bad luck for ourselves.
And please don't take this as me piling on, because it's fairly clear from your post that you are still bothered by this. I imagine it's because you spend a lot of time imagining "what could have been", but to quote Theodore Roosevelt "comparison is the thief of joy". If you can get to a point where you're grateful for what you have rather than mulling over what you missed out on, you'll probably be happier for it. Genuinely wishing you the best of "luck" in the future.
Thanks for your kind words. I took it in a positive light, and appreciate your thoughts.
I usually bottle it in, but wrote the above post as a release. I'm definitely luckier than a good fraction of the planet. I also truly believe that at some point, we really need to stop blaming our parents, and take ownership for our own actions. It is just really hard some days, to face up to the missed opportunities.
Now that I have kids, I imagine advising myself as if I was advising my kids at some point in the future. That has really worked wonders. I'd advise my own kid to say c'est la vie, and move forward in life with optimism and confidence :)
Agreed here. I quite openly will say I’m lucky to have an intense interest in computers and to develop enough skill with them to get a job in the high paying tech industry. I didn’t choose what my passions, talents, or skills are after all.
I’m always surprised that people tend to take exception to this, saying it’s nothing to do with luck, I worked hard.
That’s also true. I did and still do work hard.
But that doesn’t invalidate the fact that I had zero control over the fact I happen to live in a society that relies upon, and therefore places a high value on, the area I happen to be skilled in. There’s people with great talent in other areas that are very hard to make a living from.
Much of where we end up in life is determined by luck and chance. That doesn’t mean we’re not also working for what we have. Just means there’s multiple variables, life is unpredictable and isn’t fully within our control, and if we happen to be highly talented at something society places great value on there’s an element of luck at play.
OP here: more like, if people's resources are NOT equal (and people's abilities are not really fungible: you can have someone who's not that great but has a novel POV, or a helpful trait) then this tilts things harshly against them.
You wind up with people who are not the brightest and greatest, burdened by massive cognitive overhead, hindered rather than groomed for success, and then as a society we turn around and look at the ones who were a bit better at stuff and point to their opulence and go 'look how MUCH better this person is!'
People don't have to be equal for this to be a concern. It's a matter of whether you think society's best served by finding the most exceptional person and then having them rule everything. Even if you were able to do that, even if the person IS quite superior, they will never measure up to the bar society sets for them. They're good, but they're not nearly as good as their wealth would make it appear.
And you look at poor people or people who are flat out failing at life. They're not good, but they're not NEARLY as not-good as their poverty would make it appear. You're seeing them at their worst, and it's a wasted resource on a colossal scale.
So this is basically the argument for 'create UBI under capitalism and dominate the world through the proliferation of cool GDP you create out of all your small business people'. Basically, 'one Elon Musk is useless compared to ten thousand folks a tenth as good as him'. :)
First point: I live in Scandinavia. Poor people are just as dumb here as in USA, but we take better care of them. USA assumes that poor people should be able to take care of themselves, which doesn't work. Taking care of them doesn't make them smarter, but it makes their lives better which is the point.
I'm also from Scandinavia and I just don't agree with you. What you're saying doesn't line up with my own experiences, nor with my understanding of the statistics.
In general, it seems like you are attributing all academic performance to some innate "intelligence" in the singular. This is just a bad assumption. There are many factors behind how well you do in school, and most of them are quite obviously social. That doesn't mean that your parents academic performance doesn't influence your, but there's no basis for claiming that it's genetic. We can help people do better, and we have done so. Of course, what we're doing now isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it.
That's not about smartness or dumbness, though. I don't think intelligence is correlated with poverty much, but poverty is additional difficulty, so they have to work harder for the same thing as someone who isn't poor.
One aspect is that there's at least partial causality the opposite way. While earnings are correlated with IQ, they are even more correlated with your family earnings/socioeconomic status (SES); and there are many aspects of how low SES screws up childhood development and education (on average, not necessarily for all individuals) that would result, among other things, in lower IQ test results. I.e. it's a reasonable hypothesis that the correlation implies that low intelligence makes it hard to be rich just as much as being poor prevents one from developing and applying their intelligence.
But that isn't an issue where I'm from. The lifestyle difference between people with degrees and working class is tiny since the wage gaps are so small, and then add all government aids paying for everything including school lunches, daycare, college, healthcare etc on top of that. But still people from working class households perform extremely poorly. Helping them isn't about making them smarter or unlocking new potential because that doesn't work, it is simply to make everyone live a decent life.
So your intelligence is based on how much money your parents made? Your intrinsic ability to be educated is a function of someone else's wallet? Something seems off in this statement. I wish your parents had money, then your statement would probably be coherent!
No, intelligence is mostly inherited. If your biological parents were smart then you will almost surely be smart and vice versa. And smart people end to earn more money, so intelligence is indirectly correlated with parental wealth. But when you put kids from poor parents into rich households they will continue to do poorly. They do a bit better, but their biological parents still matters more.
If it was easy to produce smart kids then we would already do it, since smart people are so much more valuable to society the small amounts it requires to add that extra value would be nothing. But no country has managed to do this so far, its just a slow climb that follows the same trend in every western society no matter what policies they implemented.
It's not uncommon for smart people to be poor. You can be intelligent and have intelligent parents that came from poor countries, maybe parents that experienced a debilitating traumatic experience keeping them from working, or mental illnesses that don't inhibit intelligence, but do inhibit basic survival.
> But when you put kids from poor parents into rich households they will continue to do poorly.
Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?
> Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?
What you've said is unfalsifiable voodoo mumbo-jumbo. Even if someone proved you wrong here and started the experiment with the poor child at newborn level, which is what people do when these bad faith criticisms are lobbed, you'd just claim that the DNA of the baby inherited generational trauma, which is what people with your bad faith criticism resort to once the criticism is inevitably proven wrong.
I don't see how this points at evidence of inter-generational trauma which to my knowledge is recognized as bullshit voodoo. Can you explain where it does so?
This doesn't hold up to the smallest amount of rational thought. Is everyone from a poor country less intelligent? How about a poorer city, they are stupider? This sounds like an argument made by a lucky person who wants to attribute that luck to some personal superiority.
Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions. Read “guns germs and steel” for why human development through the ages has a lot do with just being at the right place at the right time.
> Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions
This goes against all of the scientific literature we have. Intelligence is determined by genetics. It can be artificially lowered via poor socio-economic conditions, but it mostly cannot be lifted by higher socio economic conditions. In laymans terms, a traumatic life can make a child who was otherwise going to be smart not so smart, but a good life cannot make a child who was going to be dumb intelligent. Socioeconomic conditions can lower the intelligence determined by genetics, they cannot improve intelligence determined by genetics.
I think this is a bit of a mischaracterization of both the science and what I was saying. Genetic intelligence is not a min/maxed limit that we all have to work hard to reach. It is something that is fairly static and innate. It can be disrupted by trauma/nutrition but obviously for the vast majority of people that is absolutely not the case. We are born with, and live up to, our genetic intelligence. Very few of us in the first world were undernourished or subjected to extreme trauma at childhood.
Yes. The author of the comment seems not the understand simple concepts like averages and normal distributions. Additionally, he/her seems to assume a causal relationship where if you're poor it is because you're dumb, and not the other way around, or even a mix of those two things.
Yeah, on average, poor people score a few points low than the average for rich people. true. But this is not an absolute as the post's author seems to believe.
It doesn't mean all poor people are dumb, or that you are automatically smarter than someone who is poorer than you.
Picture mentally two bell curves with a lot of overlap and very long tails. Things are in reality way more nuanced than this dumb statement that poor == dumb.
On the aggregate, it is a useful datapoint, it means that probably as a society, you should reserve some more resources for education in poorer neighborhoods.
I can think of at least one society that formed in the 1930's for which this was an absolute mandate! But I don't recall reading much about them past about 1945, so perhaps you should do some further research.
Yeah and welfare programs and heavy redistribution programs were tried by a society that caused several times more deaths and suffering than the one you mentioned over way longer period which we don't hear from anymore either. What kind of argument is that, seriously.
Oh shit! Several times more?
Maybe you should actually read some actual data about Soviet Union. Saying that Soviet Union caused more suffering over longer period of time than Nazi Germany is way off.
And by the way - free healthcare and free higher education are actually very good things that worked like a charm.
How can you be so sure of that?
Intelligence is not something as clear-cut as eyes color. While there are some evidence of an inheritable component, it is probably the result of the expression of several genes, with complex and different phenotypic expressions. It is far from clear how much we can expect that the offspring of smart people will be also smart, once you account for all the other variables associated with nurturing.
Meanwhile we DO KNOW that nurturing have a strong effect. This is a fact.
And then you have the problem of how to ensure that smart people have more kids. Are you going to force smart people to have kids? raise their taxes? prison? What about lower intelligence people? what do you propose? compulsory sterilization and abortion? As you can see, even if we knew for sure that smart people having relatively more offspring would actually work, The policy changes to enact that are a complete minefield of ethical and practical problems. So, at least in our society, this is clearly not a solution.
But, on the other side we do know that we can have interventions on nutrition, education and other such stuff that do have a demonstrable effect on increasing a series of variables that we collectively call intelligence.
You have, right now, for kids that already living, not some hypothetical future Einstein's offspring, tools to raise their intelligence and to make the most of their genetic potential, even if on average, their potential is a bit smaller (and always remember, intelligence is normally distributed, outliers abound, and the difference between the average of both groups is not that big to start, meaning there is a lot of overlap in relative terms, and considering we have for more poor people than rich people, is very likely that by virtude of the sheer numbers, you have more genius individuals, in absolute quantity, than on the upper classes, even if the average tends in favor of the upper classes.
And as intelligence is normally distributed, by giving poor kids a chance, you will even be able to identify among them some high potential individuals and give them the nurturing they need to reach what they are innately able to if given the chance.
So, what is your policy choice? Chase a pipe dream, while increasing inequality, something that historically always led to violence, or do something that is feasible, doable, ethical and fair?
I agree, it is so much better to say things that sounds good but doesn't help anyone. What I said doesn't benefit me at all, but spouting platitudes would.
Not all poor people are dumb, but most are. And since we are talking about statistical level effects poor people being dumb will greatly influence them.
So instead of asking "why are poor people fat, we should fix that!" you can also ask "why are dumb people fat, we should fix that!". The second gives a lot of different angles and can help find solutions the first question wont find.
This is one of the many drawbacks of socialism, even the "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" that everyone seems to be obsessed with lately in the U.S. It assumes government paper-pushers are the smartest people around with the highest I.Q. ever, and everyone else is just a dumb lightweight. It's all about that soft bigotry of low expectations.
I don't get it. People form societies because we are better off collectively. We run into problems where some people manage to rig society in a way that some people are consistently worse off and others are consistently better off.
Society as a whole is better off => every single member is better of.
There is no such relationship. However, since every individual directly contributes to the total productivity of society, we want every member to reach their maximum potential and one way to achieve that is to introduce welfare so that people at the bottom don't have to be homeless or starve because we want them to have a second chance at life.
I think people wildly over-estimate the costs of driving an older (say 5-15 years old) car and so are prone to over-pay for a new or newer car, believing they're making a good choice based on flawed data. (They remember the time they had to dump $1200 into repairs into some old heap that isn't even shiny anymore. They don't remember that for the last 24 months in a row, they saved $450 in payments, $200 in depreciation, $125 in insurance, and $20 in property/sales taxes each month. They could have a $1200 repair twice a year and still come out way ahead.)
We drive older cars. I can think of 3 times in the last 25 years where we've had car trouble that interrupted or hampered motoring (a failed battery, a failed clutch release bearing, and an electrical short). The battery is a 20 minute swap; the electrical short indeed sucked [because it required a tow home and took me most of a day to find where the short was]; the clutch release bearing left the car limpable and she was able to drive it home with quick instructions on how to start the car and drive it with third gear selected for the whole trip.
On one hand, I'm happy that the market (read: people) wildly underprices used cars, because it makes for cheap motoring for us. On the other hand, it frustrates me that people's third largest expense category is higher than it has to be and many of them could improve their situation by better optimizing this category.
tl;dr: If you want cheap[er] motoring, buy a 4-8 year old Toyota or Honda and drive it until it's 15-20 years old. Drop collision insurance as soon as you've saved enough from this strategy to replace the car. Add that savings to your snowball.
Thank you! The days of those stereotypical used cars that fall apart at 100,000 miles are pretty much over. A 10 year old economy car, maintained basically (not obsessively), will probably outlast your need for it.
Yes, a 1980s turbo Porsche or 1990s M3 will eat $10K+ a year due to constantly breaking. Not nearly the same as a 2010 Toyota Matrix, which you can probably get for $5000 and drive forever.
(Consider also: just not owning a car. Bikes and transit for the day to day and occasional outlays for wknds in the mountains is cheaper than owning any car.)
Worth considering in many places (especially due to the additional hassle of having a car in some cities) but not viable in others, at least without considerable hardship.
There are no universal solutions... Car ownership shouldn't be considered as the default option, either. I tend to think people overestimate the 'hardship' by not fully considering options to use money to overcome them. Also, daily cycling - even if not strenuous - has excellent health benefits.
For example, you can get a really nice cargo bike for a fraction of the yearly savings of not owning a car, which will last for decades and solves the 'hardship' of handling groceries. This won't work in every case (recall, no universal solutions), but it significantly shifts the decision boundaries.
My fleet consists of a 'fast' sporty bike, a folding bike (for day to day, connecting with transit, taking on train trips, etc), and an old xtra-cycle cargo bike. The bikes were built/bought 15, 5 and 12 years ago, respectively; basically free once amortized. And since I'm saving ~$5000/year by avoiding car ownership, I just try not to feel shy about using 'expensive' one off transit solutions when it's substantially more convenient.
Your math is off - for TCO you should be counting financing costs, not the payment itself. You don't really get away from financing costs by buying cash, incidentally: then they become the opportunity cost of not having the cash invested.
I think people wildly overestimate how much you can save by driving a used car. Used cars are frequently overpriced due to demand for lower up-front costs and lower payments. Edmunds' five-year TCO for a five-year-old Corolla LE is $27095, for a new one it's $26634.
The cashflow differences between buying an $8K car for cash and a $40K car with 20% down are the entire monthly payment [plus the required collision insurance], not just the interest charge portion.
I'd wager that poor people are generally running their lives on a cashflow basis, not on an accrual basis. When I was a near-broke college student, that's how I thought.
With regard to the savings of paying cash being offset by investment returns foregone, I also agree with that, which is all the more reason to save the $32K as above.
Yes, that difference, as I pointed out, is one reason why sensible used cars are overpriced. (Another is the "market for lemons" effect)
Now you're comparing a $40K new car to a $8K used car, which is not a reasonable comparison. Yes, used cars will save you some money, but they will generally cost you more money than driving a new Corolla or Civic. Poke around on Edmunds' TCO calculator. The problem with your argument is that you can save more and more money by imagining buying an even more expensive car to compare to. I mean, you could have bought an $80K car with 10% down, right? Now you saved $72K!!!
> but they will generally cost you more money than driving a new Corolla or Civic
OK. Sorry. Your comment annoyed me enough to look up my actual expenses which I've been logging since late 2007, as opposed to hypotheticals.
Between then and now, I've spent $6247 on maintenance and repairs of my cars. Note this includes standard stuff like oil changes and tire replacements. That's about $480 a year. If I extrapolate and go back to when I bought the first car, the estimate would be $8649 since 2003.
How much did I pay for those two cars? $11200 total.
They were reliable. I did two cross country trips in them, without worrying a bit. I didn't rent cars for road trips.
So a total cost in the last 18 years of $19849. Had I bought new, and included standard maintenance[1], I surely would have paid a lot more. A new Camry in those days would already be over $20K. A Civic around $14K.
And of course, insurance on old cars is cheaper. You'd think it's the other way round, but it isn't.
Obligatory disclaimer: Research your used car models before you buy. If you don't, it will cost a lot more.
[1] As a reference, my wife's almost new car has cost $3500 in repairs/maintenance in only 4 years. Yes - even new cars can end up being costly to maintain in just a few years.
Please don't apologize and please don't be annoyed. Like I told "sokoloff", I was you. I get it. "In this house we buy used cars for cash and drive them until the wheels come off." So of course I enjoy this topic.
Let's look at your numbers. Say you bought two new Civics around 2003 for $28K total. Your maintenance & repairs should not be any higher for a new Civic than for any used car I can imagine. Let's assume gas is the same, and neglect transaction costs, finance costs, etc for now. So you have a difference over eighteen years for two cars of $16800 or $933/year. Per car, you saved $467/year or $39/month. Note we are also not considering that you could have kept the new cars on the road a few years longer. Also the insurance savings is minimal - figure you save $500/year for the first five years and then it's about the same when you go to liability only. That's another $139/year over 18 years or $12/month. Yeah, that's not nothing, but it's not the TONS OF MONEY that always gets mentioned in these discussions.
Your wife's repair and maintenance costs look more in line with average than yours. Does she put a lot more miles on her car than you put on yours? I do agree that if you put a lot fewer miles per year on a car than average, a used car starts looking like a much better deal (see below).
> That's another $139/year over 18 years or $12/month
> Yeah, that's not nothing, but it's not the TONS OF MONEY that always gets mentioned in these discussions.
It's not tons of money, but as you said, it's not nothing. Saving over $50/mo is definitely very significant for me (I must have grown up poor). As I do keep track of all my finances, I know that most of my savings come from saving $50/mo here and $50/mo there.
And I was poor for many of those years - I was a grad student.
A few other points:
You quoted 28K for 2 baseline Corollas/Civic. It's a bit more than that since the $14K is 2003 prices. I bought my second car in 2011. The lowest Civic was $16.6K then. And if you get the LX (which I did get, albeit an older model), it would be $18.5K
> Note we are also not considering that you could have kept the new cars on the road a few years longer.
The counterpoint is that with used cars, you can change them every 7 or so years and still be cheaper. This way you have more variety.
Finally, there is a bit of cherry picking: You used new Corollas and Civics as your benchmark. As someone who has owned both a 2003 Civic and a 2003 Accord, there's a world of a difference when it comes to comfort - I always needed extra back support in the Civic and it still caused back pain. I never needed it in an Accord.
With older cars, the price difference between a Civic and an Accord is $1.5K max (similar for Corolla vs Camry). So if you add $3K to my total, your equivalent would be about $10K new, as 2003 Camrys/Accords sold for $20K vs $15K. That's another $32/mo.
> Your wife's repair and maintenance costs look more in line with average than yours. Does she put a lot more miles on her car than you put on yours? I do agree that if you put a lot fewer miles per year on a car than average, a used car starts looking like a much better deal (see below).
I think it's just that newer cars are costlier to repair/maintain.
Well, you brought up the Civic cost in 2003. A new Corolla is a benchmark for frugality: few cars, new or used, beat it for total cost of ownership. (with some assumptions: 15,000 miles/year etc). Note I don't own one and probably never will. The Civic is a little less frugal but similar.
It's fine that you like spending money on cars and prefer to spend more for a larger, more comfortable car. You're not minimizing your costs by buying used - you're just avoiding spending even more money. Also remember, up front cost is not TCO. Let's look at Edmunds' numbers instead of ancecdotes: a five year old base Accord has a five year TCO of $29,110. A new base Corolla has a five year TCO of $25,679. There's your "over $50/month". Fifty bucks is fifty bucks right?
Yes, it does seem we're responding to different points.
As for Edmund's TCO vs anecdotal data from my side: I can understand your viewing it that way, but of course, I'm not going to discard almost 15 years of personal data I've collected :-) I think one of the problems I've always had with the TCO is it simply has no numbers for my use case (buying older cars but with low miles).
The other problem is that whenever I look at the TCO numbers, they seem absurd. I just looked up the numbers for my wife's newer car, which was almost new when bought, and the Edmund's numbers are bordering on absurd. We had $3500 in maintenance + repairs over 4 years (and really it's $3000, as $500 was for an extra set of tires just for snow - not really a repair or maintenance). Edmunds estimate, for that vehicle, for the same span of years is $6200 - over double the reality. I've not had $6200 of repairs in a 4 year period even for my very old, used cars. We're not stingy on repairs and maintenance - we follow the recommended schedule. In fact, her car had two expensive repairs that are probably not common for her model, and I would think the amount we spent on it is above the norm.
And she drives her car more than 15K/year.
This is why for me, having actual, real data vs some weird aggregate from a web site is more meaningful. Edmunds may be good at the depreciation amount, but I question where they get the maintenance/repairs estimate.
I agree you should take Edmunds' numbers with a grain of salt - they tend to be extremely pessimistic about European cars, for example. They probably also figure on your replacing tires, batteries, etc with OEM. They don't say but they might be taking repair costs somewhere else off the distribution than the mean or median to produce a budgetary number.
Also, are you going by age or by model year? Understand that the TCO they give is for the next five years, as if you bought that model year used now.
You could just have a car whose repair costs vary a lot.
The problem with your data, given your use case, is that you can't really compare it to anything but more of your data. I'm sure if we could see how the sausage gets made there'd be plenty to criticize on Edmunds' TCO calculator but it at least provides a way to compare different new and used cars, and it breaks down the numbers in ways that allow you to work with them a little - or compare them to experience - if you are skeptical. It's also not too hard to do a similar model for comparision for different use cases (driving only 5k miles per year brings your TCO on a reliable older car way down, for example) - you'll have your own estimates for each line item instead of their data - if you want to compare against their numbers as a benchmark.
I took the average cost of a new car in 2020 or 2021. Make it a $28K new car instead of an $8K used car and you're still saving a ton of money even with a few repairs along the way.
I know plenty of people who owe money other than a mortgage who are driving $50K+ cars/trucks and sometimes have more cars than drivers in the household (and both of those blow my mind for people with non-mortgage debt).
Why not compare it to a car you scrounged for free? I mean, I'm not just arguing with you to win points. I was you.
By the way. there are other problems with your math: you're double-booking the cost of the payment and the depreciation of the car. Really, play around with a total cost of ownership calculator like Edmunds'. It will be enlightening.
Let's look at the F-150, the most popular vehicle in America. For the regular cab XL 4WD trim level, a 2020 model is $38K (close to your $40k) with a five-year TCO of
about $44K. A 2015 model is $24K... with a five-year TCO of $41K. That's a difference in TCO of $50/month. Hey, if you can save $50/month, do it, but don't tell me you're saving thousands every year.
One problem with that calculator is that it "rings up" the depreciation after 5 years, in effect assuming you'd sell the car at that point. Much of the savings here are driven by keeping the functional car for 10+ years, not having to carry collision insurance on a car that's too expensive to write off, paying less in transaction costs and taxes, etc.
It's not the calculator is "wrong" in answering the question it asks, but that it's asking the wrong thing. Very few people want to buy an 11 year old car, so buying a 6 year old car and selling it 5 years later and doing the same thing again is overly penalized vs buying a 6-year old and selling it 10-15 years later (for much less), but only doing that once instead of two or three times.
> Why not compare it to a car you scrounged for free?
Because I can't repeatably find a reliable car for free. I can repeatably find many reliable cars for $8K in any city in the US. We paid $7500 for our 2005 CR-V in 2011. It was in overall great condition with high miles (165K-ish). It now has 220K miles on it and rust will kill it long before miles do (New England road salt).
Edit to add: I agree that my method above was double-counting depreciation. I should have stuck to cash items rather than including a non-cash item.
Yeah, if you want to take it out past 5 years, you can make your own estimates. You just won't have the benefit of Edmunds' data. You are right that you will save on transaction costs if you do not buy a newer car every five years. You're also a bit of a special case in that it seems you only put about 5,000 miles per year on a car. I'd estimate your TCO on that car to be about $2K/year, which is pretty frugal. It wouldn't make sense for you to buy a new car, because you'd be losing depreciation to age faster than you'd be wearing the car out. At 20 years, you'd have only 100,000 miles on a car that would be essentially fully depreciated.
It is pretty tough, though, to get the cost of ownership on a car driven 15,000 miles/year below about $3,500/year. By comparison a new compact will be $5k to $6K per year in total cost of ownership. So if you are wondering why gold doubloons are not accumulating in the chests in your basement that much faster than they are for the guy who drives a new Honda Civic, that's why!
> You don't really get away from financing costs by buying cash, incidentally: then they become the opportunity cost of not having the cash invested.
I will never understand this logic. You do realize that this is investing on margin just with better conditions? At this point we are assuming that you already have an emergency buffer and no financial difficulty whatsoever.
The reason why you should always finance your car even if your income is low is that you can build an emergency buffer that you can use on anything. If you have $30k in your bank account and buy a $27k car then you are only left with 3k. Any potential financial problems will force you to find a loan that very day. If your monthly payment is $500 your emergency buffer will last for years. If you invest that money you will have to compensate for any losses during that time frame by having enough income, it's as if you had $0 savings to begin with.
No, you are taking out a mortgage on a depreciating asset and investing cash at your level of risk tolerance. If your level of risk tolerance is a savings account at 0.5% so you can always have an emergency buffer, that's fine.
The argument is that to make an apples-to-apples comparison of total cost of ownership of one car and another, you should always include financing costs. They are basically your lowest cost of capital. Think of it this way: even if you're going to pay cash, leaving the finance cost in allows you some basis of comparision between the cost to you of putting say, $30K cash into a car versus putting $20K cash in. It's not exact but it's a useful simplification.
They also don't necessarily find themselves in places that are entirely car-dependent. You can't really get by without a car in most of the US, and it's by design. Even in big cities.
I'm just trying to put into perspective "poor people around the world" vs "poor people in the US". From my pov, if one can afford a car, it's a little rich to call oneself poor when compared to all the people who can't afford basic necessities. And no, a car isn't a basic necessity, not even in the US.
In most places in the US, if you don't have a car, you can't get to your job. Or you can, but it involves a fragile set of bus transfers that take you 2 hours (when driving would take 30 minutes) each way, and if you miss a transfer (because the transfers don't actually line up with any reasonable schedule), you're late and risk getting fired. So instead you add a 30 minute buffer in the morning and waste even more of your time.
Or you can walk 5 miles each way. Maybe it's good for your health (though the winters might be brutal where you live, and your route might not have sidewalks, and walking into work covered in sweat in the summer might not be allowed where you work), but that's pushing 2 hours each way as well. Getting a bicycle would reduce the time requirement, but most streets in the US are pretty bike-hostile, and you still have the weather issues to contend with.
Sure, technically a car is not "required" in that scenario, but people who are poor essentially have their time as one of their few precious assets. Saving 3-4 hours a day on a commute could mean picking up another job[0] that helps reduce financial insecurity just a little bit, or allowing a parent to spend a little more time with their kids.
I think people just really don't understand what it means to be poor. I have (fortunately) never experienced it, but have heard enough first-hand accounts to get the gist of it. Everything is harder when you don't have money. Everything.
[0] And that's a whole other issue, that so many jobs don't pay a living wage, requiring someone to hold down more than one just to make ends meet.
Agreed that everything is harder when one doesn't have money. Agreed that with kids, time is a lot more precious.
But in general... walking 5 miles each way doesn't sound impossible? Back before the pandemic, I walked 6km each way to a social gathering every week. I often walk errands up to ~8km each way.
Cycling... I used to cycle to work 12km each way year round, in temperatures as low as -10°C. Challenging? Yes (I didn't have especially fancy clothes and my hands were freezing). Impossible? No.
> And no, a car isn't a basic necessity, not even in the US.
This varies considerably. There are many places in the US that are entirely car dependent (nothing within walking distance, and little to no public transportation).
Public transport is nonexistent in several places here in Texas for example - you have to have a car (or know someone who does) to get to your job in the first place. But commuting puts wear and tear on the car, especially if you can't find work particularly close to where you live.
I read a book once on extreme early retirement that advised to pick your place of work and house so that they were within walking distance of each other and also walking distance to a grocery store. The quality of the work and even your income weren't as critical as this. The idea being the goal was to finish work as soon as possible in your life when investment income could take over. Live in a one room rental, have one plate, a pot and a fork. Be a Spartan. That was the gist of it. Retire in five to ten years. Was compelling on some levels but orders of magnitude more difficult when you consider trying to bring a spouse and family into this.
Those have "no car problems" that are objectively worse than "old car problems", since the (often disastrous) consequence of the later is throwing some of the former at you.
Yes, there are some places where public transportation both exists, doesn't take most of your day, and is cheaper than cars. Those places must be great, but as a 3rd worlder I barely know them (it's not a huge problem for me, personally, it's just enraging).
I'm from a "poorish" family, but from Europe. Some stuff is relatable some is not:
- People ordering lunch always felt weird for me, in my mind I think "why should I pay 10€ for a bowl of salad, when I can go to the grocery store below the office and have the same for 1€", or even better pay 70 cents for the raw vegetables, wash them and chop them in the office and they will last 3 days
- Student debt doesn't apply, the good thing of being "poor" in Italy is that the country pays you to go to university and not the opposite
- When I got my first tech job I was like "wow, I got a MacBook just for joining the company, this costs like 1 year of salary of my previous job"
- The part of stealing I don't find relatable, even when my bank account was empty I would never resort to stealing, must be some honour system I grew up with
- The gym part is also not relatable, when I was fat and I did go to the gym everyone was very supportive, and every little progress was celebrated by everyone making you want to go more and more.
A thing I notice, is that the mentality stays with you no matter your salary, I always try to avoid spending more than necessary, with a comparison with my colleagues my monthly expenses are less than 1/3 compared to them.
I grew up dirt poor in a police no-go zone, went on to spend roughly 18 months in homeless hostels over a few years, etc.
Honestly, I feel like lots of these are related to being a poorly paid member of the tech company or having work at more working class companies.
When I started out, I literally ate toast for lunch every day because it was provided and I had no other money as time went on I got paid more and I was spending 15-25 every day on lunch. I was spending more on lunch than some people I knew would spend on food for their entire week.
The bonus at my current company was a massive issue for nearly everyone. It was constantly talked about for months because the company screwed up their finances and were talking ages to figure out what the bonus should be. Nearly everyone in my company comes from a middle class background and majority make decent money.
And the thing about the gym is probably on them, the gym is full of people all trying to better themselves and some of the most supportive people you will meet will be the gym. I would routinely tell people they look awesome and I was in awe, I would have random people come up and say well done to me that I was doing well. There are a few people who only want to hang around with other gym rats but 99% are just normal people. I remember talking to a woman who is super hot and even she felt intimidated by the gym.
The thing about stealing is a serious issue for working class companies. So many warehouses for example have security to search employees because they know if they don't lots of their product will walk out of the door with employees. I had friends that would talk about how they stole from their companies. I also heard a bunch of stories of people stealing when a company shut down.
No desire to comment on the rest of the OP points, but the one about gym was the most baffling one to me. Out of all places I could think of, gym is one of the most accepting places ever for all kinds of people (including extremely obese people).
From my own observations, people at the gym tend to fall in one of the 2 categories: they are either (a) extremely supportive or (b) totally not caring about anything but getting their own workout done and getting out. Of course there could be exceptions, but the only time i've ever even heard of such a thing happening, those types of people usually get shunned by the rest of gym goers for being assholes and ultimately banned from gyms.
In fact, more often than not, when I see a person at the gym who is clearly a very beginner (judging purely by how they are walking around for a while trying to find a specific piece of equipment, regardless of whether they are obese or not), I almost instantly see other gym goers helping them out with minor stuff or cheering them on weeks later once they accomplish a milestone. From my personal experience, the most intimidating-looking fit people at the gym end up being the nicest and most helpful towards beginners.
This sidenote aside, I find it extremely suspicious that the OP just said "It was crystal clear I don't belong" in reference to gym, without any specifics. What made it "clear" to her? The fact that she was looking at other people and realized that a lot of them were a bit further along their journey to being fit? Or did something actually happen that made her feel that way? Because a lot of her other points and complaints seem to have a lot of specifics, but this one has absolutely none.
It is also a bit strange how she is all about utilizing all other benefits and perks provided by the company, as evident by her mentioning tons of specific instances of that (no shame in that, as everyone should feel empowered to take advantage of things offered to them by the employer for free). She even rationalizes a lot of it as something due to her being from a rather poor background, even if she knows she shouldn't utilize those as much (drinking until getting sick, because it is free). But when it comes to the gym membership covered by her employer, she is totally willing to give up this perk, despite it usually being a pretty valuable perk in terms of costs covered.
Not all gyms are created equal, and it's possible she (perhaps through ignorance or lack of choice based on the reimbursement) picked one that is full of judgmental people who are already fit and just go to the gym as status signaling and/or to maintain their fitness. Also, "gym" might mean some sort of "fitness class program", so it might not just be a big room with cardio equipment, free weights, and weight machines. The fitness class type does anecdotally seem to attract more of the status-conscious people than do-your-own-exercise type gyms do. (To be completely fair, the fitness class type does of course attract a lot of people just looking for a more structured way to get into shape.)
While I agree that most gyms are great places full of supportive people (or at least people who don't give you a second look and will leave you to do your thing in peace), there are also certainly some gyms that seem to exist more as status symbols than anything else.
But still, assuming she had a choice (again, maybe the company gym perk only covered one specific gym), she absolutely should not have given up after that one experience, and should have tried another gym. I do get how it can be hard enough to get yourself to go the gym in the first place, though, and a bad experience can completely drain any motivation to continue on.
I think the author's point about stealing has more to do with the way low-wage workers are assumed to be criminals by their employers, and have to deal with various invasive security measures their employer requires.
> I think the author's point about stealing has more to do with the way low-wage workers are assumed to be criminals by their employers, and have to deal with various invasive security measures their employer requires.
Assuming that all low-wage workers are criminals is obviously bad, from a "fellow human being" point of view. And yet, the author describes stealing $350 headphones in the last lines of the article because their employer trusted them to return equipment without any oversight. Honestly not sure what point they were trying to get across by leaving that in.
Because it's the kind of thing high-salary workers do often without even considering it stealing. The headphones are used. If someone has a bougie enough job, they probably expect not to be assigned used headphones, and they don't think through whether the company would be selling them on because they certainly wouldn't bother in their own life. Alternately, there is a mindset of "oh, well, it'd be more money to clean them than they're worth at this point, they're just going to throw them out" (mentally estimating from the effort at the rate that that person is paid, not at the rate earned by the person who'd get stuck with the cleaning). Personally, I've seen people do this in ways I find shocking. The author is pointing out that she has also been affected by her environment, that she also has changed to act in ways she would have found unbelievable prior. I don't think it's trying to say "look I've advanced to act like these people".
IME employee "shrinkage" has less to do with opportunity (remember, employees know the security posture of their workplace; if the public has access, engineering around them is not difficult), and more to do with motive. That is, shrinkage increases when employees are underpaid and disrespected. As is common everywhere, observation of arbitrary rules is down to the push-pull of saving face vs survival. So the issue is not the purported exceptional criminality of low-wage workers, but the low wage itself.
The aforementioned security posture is also often misaligned. I've worked at a warehouse where the only things that could be stolen are fill hoses and washing machines. Clearly, no one was walking out with anything of significance, but we still had to empty our pockets and step through a metal detector every time we hit the floor. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars of easily-pocketable personal electronics disappeared from another warehouse; no metal detector.
> - The part of stealing I don't find relatable, even when my bank account was empty I would never resort to stealing, must be some honour system I grew up with
Do you mean the last bit about the Macbook and the headphones, or the bit about the snacks? The snacks were more of a "it is fundamentally impossible to steal cheap stuff because we have infinite cheap stuff, why do you even care that someone took it!" mindset.
> Because they have never been poor, they had no idea what I might do. Why would I steal, when everyone clearly has enough?
from how I understood it, because she has been poor, she had reasons for stealing.
In companies I worked for the snacks are there for being taken, I notice in every company I worked for there's the rule "the company is going to put stuff in the kitchen in some common areas, everyone is free to take them", I did always ask to a colleague about that, just to be sure I don't steal the pack of chips another colleague left there.
> from how I understood it, because she has been poor, she had reasons for stealing.
No, it says that nobody even considered that she might steal, because rich people don't see the point of stealing when stuff is so cheap relative to their wealth that it's effectively free.
That's why nobody bothered to even escort her, stealing just didn't even occur to them at all.
I believe it depends on the value of the object and the chances of getting caught. If you steal a macbook in an office full of cameras is a bad deal. If you steal a macbook every other day in an office without any camera is a good deal.
And the second option is exactly what happened in an office I worked on, at some point enough people complained that their macbook was stolen and they installed cameras.
Funny thing in the same office my lunch was stolen once a week and that just became a joke during stand-ups "did they stole your lunch today?"
Didn't anyone bother to set up the MacBook activation locks? Or did people steal MacBooks anyway just to throw them away later when they turn out to be unusable?
> Didn't anyone bother to set up the MacBook activation locks?
The macbooks were handled by the IT department, everyone was just using them, so I don't know if such a function was enabled, the only security measures I know there were are remote login and disk encryption.
I don't know what the person that stole the macbooks did with them, but because he/she stole more than one I believe he/she was able to make a profit
I'm from Spain and I find relatable. I've been in places where I didn't have to eat, so when people orders food every day I just compute in my head how much money goes to waste.
Another thing that I do, is consider the ability to repair tech without lock-in. Being a techie poor teachs you to be careful about this decisions, but people seem perfectly fine to be locked in and just buy new stuff every time.
There has been a lot of time since I don't buy new tech. My phone is second hand, my laptop is a second hand ThinkPad, I have two Eizo Screens that came through ebay, my upgraded desktop has an I5 from ebay, and RAM is probably second hand too, I don't remember.
Eh, it doesn't go to waste, it goes to other people.
> Being a techie poor teachs you to be careful about this decisions, but people seem perfectly fine to be locked in and just buy new stuff every time.
Yes, this is a big one! Ever since I got into hardware as a hobby I can repair many more devices with a 3D-printed part or replacing a burnt component, now I'm horrified at how often people will just get a new device. Repair shops should be more common, and repair should be easier, as that is truly wasting money (because you're throwing away a usually perfectly usable device that just needs a bit of repair).
I read the whole thing trying to find something I could relate to, as I grew up in a place that was a proper third world country as recently as in the 90s.
This appears to be American poor - which I think is in its own category, because comparing to American rich it's just so much worse off.
It's not that she's necessarily materially poor. It's just that there's no one around who can even begin to understand her predicament.
I only ever get close to this when I talk with people who have inherited wealth and give sage advice like "you should be saving 70% of you salary".
What I find so fascinating about this article is how it conveys the anxiety of being poor in America. How you're always one "bad luck" event from falling down a socio-economic peg, and recovering from that is so hard. Other places around the world, you're poor, but so's everyone else and you're all in it together.
"What's more, the poor in other countries know that they are living in poor countries. They know that not only they but just about everyone is on the edge of starvation. The poor in the United States, on the other hand, are daily told on all sides that the United States is rich and wonderful. Movies and television constantly show them what happy lives other people are leading. The poor and hopeless are made to feel alone and imprisoned by misery in the midst of a victorious and wealthy and endlessly self-congratulating society." -- Isaac Asimov, "Just Say 'No'?"
She lives in her social environment and is subjectively (and relatively) poor compared to the rest of the social environment The word poor is not strictly defined, so her "poorness" does not compare to "third-world-poorness".
She expresses exactly that. She starts each sentence that she realizes that she is poor compared with them. Relative. I do not have the feeling that she even feels miserable about it.
Well, if most accounts are correct, being "American poor" means you may have to endure, or at least seriously worry about, things like frequently missing meals, going without important and relatively basic healthcare, being forced to live in a dangerous neighbourhood, and even homelessness. It might not make you one of the world's poorest people, but it seems you can quite easily experience a pretty meaningful level of absolute poverty in the US, not just find yourself poorer than others in the country. And this is worsened by the fact that certain "non-essential" things like mobile phone service, Internet access or even a working and fuelled-up automobile may be essential to keeping your access to paid work.
For me it was mostly not being able to afford school books and clothes, shoes other than Chinese supermarket stuff - so something that wouldn't last two seasons. Also five people living in a 45m2 apartment - thankfully only until I was twelve or so.
We reached a low point as a family when I was in college and my father, who left a few years earlier, stopped supporting us. Fortunately by that time I had a part-time job and could at least pay for my own food and cleaning products most of the time.
My SO had it worse though - four people in a studio apartment until she was about eleven and her father, the sole consistent breadwinner, left when she was a teenager, from which point on they had to sustain themselves on alimony and occasional jobs their mother would take.
A family member has told me a story of her poor childhood in the thirties in rural Poland. During springs, their family had to steal rotten potatoes from other people's fields and eat weeds to survive. THAT's being poor. What the original article describes sounds more like a anxiety over a risk of falling into poverty, than actual poverty.
I think a more precise term for it might be "financially insecure". You can make things work, it involves a bit of scraping here and there, but you are one bad-luck event (unexpected medical bill, car break-down, etc.) from being unable to pay your regular bills.
Being in such extreme poverty that you need to eat stolen rotten food and weeds is another category entirely.
I don't know - my mom and dad both subsistence farmed in Poland in the 50s through 70s (and largely never stopped). For sure we had to eat weeds (I continue to), and sometimes steal some "not great" potatoes or other vegetables or fruits. Don't knock it till you try though, those "weeds" are often waaaaay more nutritious than the store-bought bullshit, and often much more delicious. Unfortunately, often those 'weeds' were cultivated by a single family (and kept in the family and protected as a secret to surviving the next big one), and now they're nothing but a memory.
Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?
You're right there Obediah.
Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?
Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
A cup ' COLD tea.
Without milk or sugar.
OR tea!
In a filthy, cracked cup.
We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, 'Money doesn't buy you happiness.'
'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.
House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
You were lucky to have a ROOM! We used to have to live in a corridor!
Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.
Well when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.
We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!
You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
Cardboard box?
Aye.
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!
Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was the only person who would say hello to the cleaning lady as she meekly made her rounds around us when we worked late. Everyone else had a long habit of ignoring anyone like her.
That's IMO the worst behaviour of the rich listed in this article. I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all. What kind of society is this that Google is building? Aren't you even allowed to acknowledge someone else's humanity?
>What kind of society is this that Google is building? Aren't you even allowed to acknowledge someone else's humanity?
The social interaction dynamics that happens at the Google building is a reflection of society at large. As another example, I've worked at the offices of charity institutions where the higher level white collar workers ignore the cleaning people. The common theme is that humans in general (and not Google employees specifically) like to stratify people.
I recently flipped through a high school yearbook (these books were more popular before the era of Facebook) and noticed that the cafeteria ladies were relegated to a tiny group photo. However, the teachers got individual portraits. So a public institution funded by taxpayer money implicitly stratified 2 different types of workers. Each page of printing a hardcopy yearbook costs money and the food workers are not the same value to the yearbook staff. See the common pattern across humanity?
I would say that having individual pictures of teachers make sense as those are the people students have most personal contact with. Now the other administrative staff and cafeteria ladies should be at same level.
There's another side of this which is that you and the janitor have very little common ground so while you can say hi to each other anything beyond the most basic small-talk is going to get very uncomfortable for both parties very fast.
I'm not going to post my credentials on HN but I have it on good authority that these jobs suck enough without having to pretend to relate to your customer. Hello is fine but beyond that and the janitor probably has their shields up lest they say something stupid the same way a white collar professional would be very careful talking to Bill Gates.
You share the same space. How distant are you with other people that you can't just say hi? Does it matter if you don't discuss politics after it?
When i was a kid, i had to take the bus and i forgot my bus ticket (a pupil, on one bus stop, everyday, the same bus stop the same bus driver on a school route...) and he put a lot of energy into telling me off.
A few days/weeks later i thought about it and i also thought about why i'm not greeting my bus driver when i enter. I started to say hi. I liked it. I liked saying hi to my bus driver.
I forgot my bus ticket again. No issues no worries. there was mutual respect and that mutual respect came to acknowleding him.
I like greeting my neigbhours as well. Somehow it makes a small connection between us.
and yes i read the part with the shield: The first step is a hi. Every other step is easier not harder. Finding out their names, a little bit of talking about family and friends etc.
If i would have worked close enough to Bill Gates i probably would have talked to him sooner or later. Why not? He is a human, not like Mark Zuckerburg.
I say hi only and came from a fairly well-off family.
Every additional complaints about my life or happenings in my life that I would have would be unrelatable to the maids and the drivers at our house and it might make them feel uncomfortable.
I know who they are, of course. And birthday and their sons and daughters birthdays. That's how we give gifts. We know who they are and where they are as well - we wouldn't hire them without knowing that.
They couldn't relate - my bad day would be related to losing a few points on a foreign exam or if my favorite restaurant was overbooked.
The startup I worked for had Spanish speaking cleaning staff. I even brushed up my Spanish to greet them - the smiles on their faces are with me to this day. It wasn't what I was going for but I'm happy that it had this effect.
Socially dominant cultures' mistreatment of others is always more visible to the others. You're one data point. People on the other side of the divide have many more data points from which to judge.
I worked in an Ivy League university while poor— and continued doing so for quite some time. I assure you that treating people in lower socioeconomic classes either as invisible or a mildly concerning presence, depending on the context, and coming from a wealthy, white background is closely correlated. Many of the wealthier students, faculty, and professional staff treated the cleaners, landscapers, catering staff and cafeteria workers like furniture. Of course, there were exceptions.
I saw a similar juxtaposition in tech, though the ratio of wealthy to non-wealthy wasn't as extreme as it was in an elite university.
We have cleaning during work hours, so the idea that someone wouldn't talk to the cleaning staff is absurd to me. Why wouldn't I talk to someone who moves around the office for most of the day.
There’s a strong correlation, however, which I think comes down to whether you have either done or know someone in that kind of job. People who ignore the staff may not be intentionally mean about it - it’s just outside of their normal frame of reference and they haven’t been introspective about that.
>That's not a sign of being poor, it's a sign of not being an ass.
Seriously, why wouldn't you talk to the janitor or anyone else? They're the reason you have a clean place to work. I never got the "nothing in common" routine either. They're people, with lives and families and wants and needs. Yeah, they're not spending their day banging their heads against their desks solving reference counting bugs, but they're working to support their lives as best they can.
Oh ignoring the cleaning staff is utter kindness compared to what WeWork did: costumed them in outfits featuring slogans like “Do what you love” etc. while refusing them $10/hr pay.
> I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all.
Googler for many years here. I've never heard of this kind of thing. One of the most prolific and loved content creators on the internal meme board is in sales. The closest thing I've ever heard like this in the entire valley is that at Apple they don't pay for the lunch bill of non-engineers, so having premium lunch options can feel exclusive to engineers.
One of the most widely praised decisions Google made during the pandemic was to continue to pay their vendor staff who maintain the buildings even though there was no work to be done. And they kept that promise (as far as I can tell) for the entire process even though the initial expectation was that WFH would last for a few months.
My personal experience at Google has been that people do chat with vendor staff like custodial workers and kitchen staff.
How about earlier this month when corporate asked child care workers to come back to the office to take care of your kids and refused to re instate their transportation benefits?
> > I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all.
> Googler for many years here. I've never heard of this kind of thing.
Not a Googler myself, but from what I heard the divide isn't between engineering and non-engineering roles, but between Google employees and contractors (and that you can tell who is which by their badges).
Last time I was there (which was admittedly like six years ago) the person I was visiting said they got some stipend to be used at the cafeteria. Entirely possible I've misremembered.
This might be a learned defence mechanism against a general feeling of wearines with the state of the world. You might work a (relatively) well-paying job at a megacorp, but often you're confronted with colleagues that get promotions through what seems like bullshit projects, you see how useless your directors or even execs seem to be and how much cash they pocket, and you're forced to do some sham work yourself, maybe because whoever is leading your team wants to advance their career. So your everyday work experience is crap, and you have no agency over anything, and you feel miserable.
Then you see the cleaning staff, and you're confronted with their reality, the fact that they have to do work that is both harder and potentially more useful than what you're doing but they don't get any of the benefits, and they get paid a fraction of what you do, and that just makes you feel even worse, like this entire system is somehow fundamentally broken, which makes you want to trow your ergonomic chair out of the unopenable glass window of your open space.
I am shocked that more people dont acknowledge that the more you get paid the less "hard" the work you do is.
Like there's an entire well known meme about rest and vest at Google. (Amazon and Netflix will bounce you though if rumors are true)
It's been true my entire life that every bracket of pay raise increase i've gotten has had a commensurate decrease in the amount of physical labor and mental exhaustion i would suffer.
Going from minimum wage to 30k+ was a breath of fresh air. Going pass 100k was realizing you were living in a coal mine where everyone smoked and the 30k just meant you got to take clean air breaks every now and then. Of course then you have the attendant desperation in the US of "falling down" back to the level you were before and knowing the life style you live now can not possibly be sustained in those positions.
A simple mental exercise. When was the last time you had to ask permission to use the restroom at your place of employment?
One serious issue i've seen with alot of tech workers is that they have NO IDEA whats it's like to ever work minimum wage. They went from middle class existence to college to a tech job making more money than most people ever will. The minimum wage worker and even middle wage worker existence is invisible and nonsensical to them.
This is probably a large part of it. The higher up the chain you go the more obvious it is - the system, the game, whatever you want to call it. Finally understanding what it means to sell your soul, and seeing that at least the janitor kept most of theirs.
Some of it is situational though. I only sometimes say hello. I also worked as a janitor before and have no problem with people not saying hello. The bigger issue is if they are ignoring you and messing up your work (getting in the way, ignoring you when you need to get their trashcan from their desk, being an excessive slob like I'm here to clean but you don't have to make my job harder just because you don't have to clean it up yourself).
> I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all.
I worked at HQ as an engineer, and didn't notice any such thing.
Most of the time I probably didn't say hi to cleaning staff, for the same reason I wouldn't say hi to most of the people I pass by in the office: because they weren't someone I knew. Of course this might vary depending on context, but I was treating them the same way I treated everyone else, or at least trying to.
Do other people say hi to every single person you see in the building every day?
one thing that stood out to me when i was in Southampton in the UK was that every passenger on the bus would say some form of "thank you" on their way off the bus.
To me this sounds bizarre, like trying to greet every person you pass by in a city. I see dozens, if not hundreds of people in the office every day, if I said hi to everyone it would be really strange.
Not saying hello is a bit extreme but I feel like often IT people just refrain from initiating conversation with people unrelated to their interests/work
I once read a AskReddit about people who worked for extremely rich people.
Many said that the old man and wife, who built the fortune, were nice humble people that understood that they are so lucky to have made it in life. Many comments also said that their children were absolute spoiled brats who were the exact opposite to humble.
I only got into tech a bit over five years ago and that was the first time in my entire life I had been above the (demonically low) US poverty level.
There is absolutely a difference in how rich and poor people treat poor service workers.
It's not that poor people treat them better per se but it's different. Poor people can be cruel to each other because they are all suffering, crab in a bucket shit.
Rich people mostly ignore poor people because visible poverty makes them uncomfortable so they look away. They hate themselves if they see our humanity so they try not to.
I've been on both sides of this and am speaking from painful experience in both cases.
"Rich people mostly ignore poor people because visible poverty makes them uncomfortable so they look away. They hate themselves if they see our humanity so they try not to."
It has to be amazing having such a simple world model. Or better yet, being able to know the deepest ideas and thoughts in other people's minds and to explain their behaviour.
Going back to seriousness, and leaving sit-com cliches aside, do you have any solid evidence about this? and when you say rich, could you give a ballpark of the money they have to have to be considered rich? Because poor people in US would have better living conditions than in other countries in Europe, for example.
No I'm not getting into this. I've done this so, so many times and there's no value for anyone.
You, or someone else, will move the goalposts, or find some hyper specific counterexample and claim it disproves the entire thing. Or claim that the poor aren't poor enough, or someone else somewhere has it worse so their misery can't be real.
It's based on my experiences and there's no bibliography for my life. I explained the experiences and why I think they're relevant. If it doesn't work for you then it doesn't.
From experience in similar conversations I expect this to be taken as a refusal to argue in good faith. The thing is though I don't want to argue. I said what I said and I stand by it. I have nothing to add.
> I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all. What kind of society is this that Google is building?
For me, and I suspect many others in tech, this has more to do with introversion than anything else. When I cleaned for a cafe, I just wanted to focus on my task on hand.
To be fair, large tech companies have a lot of people, most people don't talk to most people in tech companies, even if they are the same 'position'. Much like you don't talk to most random students as you walk around at large university as a student at the university. You talk to your classmates and professors and if circumstance permits, you talk to random stranger students sometimes.
There's probably a handful of other people who would say hello to the cleaning lady but don't feel comfortable doing it because they're in the same position as the author but realized nobody says hello to the cleaning lady and decided they'll just do what everyone else is doing in order to fit in.
To me, this reads more as a list of "from outside the valley bubble" signifiers than it does as a list of things that people who've grown up in poverty might do, even if the former was a result of the latter.
There are some exceptions - not noticing missed paychecks is the biggest - but most of it is just stuff that happens every day in other offices.
Making your lunch at the office and not bringing Advil from home? I know generationally wealthy investment bankers who do these things, and they're the kind of people who spent their childhood summering at Fishers Island.
I grew up very wealthy and it is what it is. I read that list and some parts of it make me sad and some make me laugh. There's been times I've been that asshole, and times I've not been. Some of the things are very American - like the teeth thing which is basically the ultimate American neurosis. We were rich but I didn't want someone messing with my perfectly useful teeth.
There's no point being overly defensive about these things. People with all kinds of life experience can learn from each other.
> There's no point being overly defensive about these things. People with all kinds of life experience can learn from each other.
I don’t think this is the fault of the author. When you’ve never had the chance or experience or bank account to dream of doing something that many people take for granted it’s easy to sort of clam up or realize your different and that you have to try harder to fit in.
But wealthy people should be defensive about it. Or at least acknowledge the fact that we have severe and increasing income disparity in America and a lot of people are suffering with anxiety and other ills because we let so many people expose themselves to massive risk by being poor.
In Europe, you don't go bankrupt when you get sick. Health care is one of the top causes of bankruptcy in America. In more socialized countries, you don't lose your housing when you lose your job. You don't need to struggle to keep a car (which you need for a job) because there is public transit and you're almost guaranteed access to higher education.
The upper middle class and higher need to realize this is a big systematic risk for the country.
"Being defensive about it," would be getting offended and denying that others have these sorts of experiences. That is what the other commenter was suggesting wealthy people should not do.
I don't really see this as a valid criticism of the list though. A person identified a bunch of ways they are not like almost all of the rest of their coworkers.
Do they have the information, experience, or responsibility to accurately categorize the specific cultural origin of every single one of those differences? Does it make the argument weaker if they miss a couple? Maybe a little but it's still strong.
I don't want to trivialize what the author is feeling, but when the conclusion they draw is...
> Because they have never been poor, they had no idea what I might do. Why would I steal, when everyone clearly has enough? What even is scarcity? Why drink yourself to death tonight when there’s another sponsored event a week from now? Why eat like there will never be enough, when there has always been more than enough?
...I think it's worth discussing whether they may have misidentified the real root cause.
Do you think it might be possible to appreciate the reality and sincerity of someone's experiences while also questioning the validity of their interpretations? Would this be a form of substantive engagement on the merits of the piece?
Personally, I see someone describing a number of points of cultural difference and an author who wholeheartedly believes they have identified the root of all of them. Is it worth discussing that the real, indisputably valid lived experience of the author, might also be linked to other things?
Yeah I think I've been pretty clear that I think that conversation is possible and also that I think that is not the conversation that is happening in this thread.
> Does it make the argument weaker if they miss a couple? Maybe a little but it's still strong.
What if they miss almost every single one? That's how it reads to me, for almost every job I've had. That's why people are reacting like they are to the article.
There's a place somewhere between "making a lot of money" and "being truly wealthy" where a person can become obsessively frugal. Think of it as hoarders, but for money. They don't want to spend a penny more than they have to, because they have a kind of psychological investment in their net worth. Yes, they will spend a lot of money on some thing in order to be able to display their wealth as their class demands, but they'll pinch every penny in other ways. Think of the guy who tries to stiff a contractor, or never tips for service.
So for your generationally wealthy investment bankers, summering at Fishers Island is a necessary conspicuous display of wealth as well a as networking and social process. Eating the office food and using the office pain killers are largely invisible, but to a person obsessed with having money, the costs are accounted for in their personal ledger.
Or maybe the office painkillers and office food are just plain convenient? Which is why the office supplies them in the first place? It has nothing to do with being "money obsessed." Maybe my office is some weird outlier, but nearly every one of these "i'm poor in tech because" examples apply to my office, despite us being wealthy in tech.
Well, yes, but are you the sort of independently generationally wealthy money-hoarder I'm referring to, or just one of the many folks who, while not poor, are still basically wage slaves who can't quit their jobs because they have a mortgage, kids, student loans, and need the health insurance? If you're the latter, the convenience factor is a money factor in disguise: you're so busy trying to maintain yourself and your family that you don't really have time to make your own lunch.
I work as a consultant and I regularly forget to send invoices for a month (sometimes two). It's been years since I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I can afford to skip out on months of income and not notice for day-to-day expenses. And I'm lazy about creating invoices (I should automate this and keep a regular activity log instead of pulling stuff from git and emails but yeah).
More importantly I've worked with other consultants and I got the impression that people from finance are used to chasing them for invoices, so I don't think it's that rare.
"Making your lunch at the office and not bringing Advil from home? I know generationally wealthy investment bankers who do these things"
Generally they don't like to waste money. That's part of how they stay rich for generations (as opposed to someone who hits the lottery and the next generation is basically back to where they started in many cases).
You think someone with generational wealth would stop to even consider the cost of advil or a lunch in FiDi? They don't. This little bit of mythology has always been amusing to me. They may make their own lunch out of habit or simply because they have a preference or whatever--but cost isn't a reason for people of that much wealth.
They don't like wasting money, but what they consider "waste" is not the same thing as what someone who isn't wealthy would consider waste.
Fun anecdata from my own life:
I grew up under varying amounts of poverty and now I make Big TechCo money. As I have gotten a lot better about shedding a certain kind of survival-hoarding-mindset "I don't need to keep <this half-broken thing> because I can get a new one when I need one again", I have found myself developing new neuroses about "waste" of things that my old self would have considered insignificant: (personal) office supplies, succulent leaves that have fallen off but that I can propagate, 5-year-old magazines I haven't read yet. It's like I maintained some amount of the anxiety but in the absence of the pressure to direct it usefully, it's gone cuckoo.
If you like going to the cafeteria or out to lunch, by all means you should do so if you can afford it. But it's also entirely reasonable not to spend money out of habit. For example, while I may do so when traveling, I have zero interest in getting a daily Starbucks fix.
(I often drive by a local Starbucks which usually has a line of cars around the block getting to go. I have to wonder who these people are who want to wait for 20 minutes or whatever to get their $5 latte at all hours of the day.)
If you make £100,000 then an hour of your time is worth ~£48.
You can get lunch for £10 or less, and cooking at home doesn't cost £0, so unless you are replacing a fancy two course lunch with a made at home sandwith, I dont see you saving over £2k a year.
Warren Buffet is cool and all, but he is not the world's lunch expert
Yea I mostly agree. For example not greeting cleaning lady has nothing to do with being rich or poor. It is just manners and some of us do it and some don't.
30 years ago the cleaning lady was staff and had a very small number of stock options and had time to chat with the people pulling all-nighters at work. I even dated her daughter a couple of times.
Today the cleaning person works for an agency, is a different person every night and has 4 hours to do 8 hours worth of work.
Manners? I don't say hi to the cleaning staff for the same reason I don't say hi to most people I see in the office: I don't know them. If I did, then I would say hi.
Do others greet every single person they see in the building?
Yes. You are working late, someone comes by your desk to empty your trash. You say hi and thank you. Especially once to realize you see the same person every night.
> Do others greet every single person they see in the building?
Yes I always did. Would get into some long chats with one of the cleaning ladies actually. And if someone came into my office to do maintenance on the aircon unit I'd of course greet them.
I actually greet every person I see. This means waving at people driving by, and walking by. Very strange that this is not seen as a normal custom it seems. I wonder when did this change.
Sorry to say, but you’re being extremely naive if you think you’re right. People are awful to supporting staff and show them no respect on the regular.
It happens across class lines _but_ I find that it's not the same degree. I find that the more used you are to people cleaning up after you the less that you thank them/acknowledge them for doing so. The teenage "I can leave my trash here - they have cleaning staff to clean it up!" mentality seems to be more prevalent the higher income your background is.
I say hello to the cleaning staff, security staff, delivery drivers, food service workers, etc at work. I can't get my job done unless they're there, and I am acutely aware that our professional experience and treatment by management is significantly different.
this actually reminds me of an article i read on nyt some time ago, about poor college students or first gen students in top colleges.
the parents were invited to the school to meet the faculty and the parents who were college educated or those went to the same type of schools understood the song and dance - the mingling with the adminstrative staff, the dean of students, the professors and lecturers - and the parents who were not educated or were part of the lower class didn't know what to do, so they hung out with the cafeteria staff, asked the cafeteria staff to take care of their kids. those were the people their families and relatives knew and understood.
and the first gen students also understood that they belonged to the same social strata as the cafeteria staff, and things like office hours or asking for help from the professors or the TAs were something that they could not possibly be entitled to.
Yep this was my impression too. I'm from a professional class family in the rural part of the midwest now living in a cosmopolitan "crunchy" wealthy town. A lot of the stuff in here (like the stuff about food choices and tampons) is similar to things that set my teeth on edge just a bit in my town (and also, but not exclusively, at my office). I don't interpret it as stemming from wealth disparity but rather cultural and class disparity, which is related but not identical. For instance, people at the same wealth level as my family are much more likely to eschew fast food here and generally form more of their identity around their food choices. It's cultural.
But a lot of the article does strike me as stemming from wealth disparity, and is very interesting. Indeed, another thing to add to the list is being unable to distinguish between behaviors that are different because of culture vs. because of wealth.
I brought my lunch to the office for many years but then I went in consulting and had to work from home and live in hotels and then its quite hard to prepare lunch or bring leftovers to work. If you stay in hotels
This is different from being poor in the financial sense. It goes deep into the poor mindset and pscyhology and how it can stick around even after you're doing okay. My parents are working class, I'm an immigrant and I had a minimum wage job for a few years - I've never felt any of the things listed in this article, before or after I was doing okay financially, in or outside of tech.
Absolutely this. My wife and I both grew up very poor and even though we've worked up to being relatively well off in adulthood, we both still have a mindset in certain contexts that's very similar to this article.
It's very scavenger-like and I suppose we may lose it if we manage to stay well off long enough, but it definitely colours our decision making even in little things. Being poor definitely stretches beyond the literally financial.
I checked off the majority of the points the author mentioned but I never felt bad or alienated for it. Money can buy you things, most of them are a dumb waste. Why should I feel bad? They’re the idiots blowing their paychecks on trendy useless things.
I’m also an immigrant and have never seen such salaries in my life outside of executives so I’m just riding the gravy train. Again, I feel extremely lucky and great to be a part of it. Not beating myself up over having a bigger delta from my childhood than some of my coworkers. Isn’t that the American dream? I would also add that getting McDonalds was the summit of culinary experiences a few times a year when I was growing up. I’m sure people here would find that funny but I’m proud of my life and my background.
I do use an Uber for social calls as it buys me easily 2 hours of my life back as public transport kinda sucks
I grew up poor and now live and work around "never been poor" folks. Classism 100% exists. The thing that I noticed most folks can't grasp is the appreciation for the small things and the security they have.
I find that people who have never experienced being poor are often lacking in both humility and "can do" attitudes.
For me, not being wealthy is a feature, not a bug. I realize I'm speaking from a place of privilege now, though.
After college I lived with a bunch of UT students (good university; median family income of students is $123,900[0]) while working at a school for high school dropouts (median family income unknown, but definitely under $30k) and it really impressed upon me that people coming from families in the 75th income percentile expect to live free of the poverty/class markers mentioned in the article, while for people in poverty, they're merely effects of actual, pervasive struggles.
Rich kid will thinks they're poor if they're low on petty cash, or if their phone is two years old and has a cracked screen. They never worry that they'll not be able to pay for their phone next month, or have skip a meal to make rent.
I grew up in a well-off-but-frugal household, so I had a lot of the poverty markers listed, but for me they were frugality markers.
The core of poverty isn't the visible markers. Anyone can have those. It's the pervasive stress of not having money, constantly being on the precipice of your life going into a sudden, deep dive. I never had that. Even when I earned ~$13k/year in Americorps, I was fine because I had no debt, I was used to living cheaply, and I knew that if it really came down to it, my parents could help me out. The poor high school students I worked with had the opposite family situation: they'd miss school because family depended on them to help with the bills.
If I ever have kids, I feel like I'll need to go out of my way to ensure they don't grow up segregated into wealthy enclaves. The US is sorted by income--neighborhoods, schools, social circles, and workplaces--and it makes us blind to others' situations. I don't want them to be constantly stressed about money, but it's important to be able to handle financial constraints, and to be aware and understand of the actual reality so many people live with.
I relate to being (somewhat) well-off-but-frugal, and for me there is a danger of falling into the trap of thinking: I don't care that I have some markers of being poor, so you shouldn't either.
It is largely a matter of luck to be in a situation where you don't have to worry about maintaining a certain appearance, and developing some empathy for those who do has been an important positive change for me.
Of course you view things differently if you've never been poor. But that doesn't make you evil, and OP is not a victim. In none of her examples was anyone treating her badly. (I know you are not claiming this, just saying).
In fact, as you hint, having been poor and then getting in to the middle class you probably have a better chance of making it big.
The article doesn't mention they're software engineering interns, and she made less than some other jobs too: "I still made less than any of the executive assistants, or the receptionist. I was, in fact, the lowest-paid person in the building including the interns"
The way I read it, it implies that the receptionist got paid more than than the interns. Either way, she got paid less even than than receptionist, which is generally not exactly a high-paid job.
It's also not clear to me what exactly her job was by the way?
I don't know how things are in the US, but I've never seen interns being paid more than a token amount in Europe. You generally take on interns as a public service and to spot potential talent to hire, not because they're good/productive programmers. A good internship requires quite a lot of guidance from a senior developer.
> She is a writer and not a software engineer. Comparing her salary to software engineer interns therefore isn't fair.
I'm going to call BS on that. Written communication is a high-leverage activity that if you are going to the trouble of having a dedicated position for it, paying that person well is a pretty good idea. Perhaps not as well as an engineering role of similar seniority, but about as well as a design or QA role (and for similar reasons).
Paying that person less than an intern is both shortsighted and insulting.
The question is not if writing is important. It's very easy to argue that a nurse is more important than any engineer, but they are never paid as well, people have more or less accepted that.
I'm not arguing for the importance of writing except in the sense that similar arguments used to be made for the importance of design.
If you actually have a dedicated writer on staff (as opposed to outsourcing it to a marketing agency), paying them less than an intern is as mind-bogglingly stupid as paying a full time designer less than an intern.
BTW, nurses may get paid less than engineers, but they don't get paid less than medical residents, which is a more appropriate parallel to an engineering intern.
I didn't grow up poor but we didn't have extra of anything and we sure couldn't afford to lose a paycheck. The thing I find absolutely unbelievable and will never understand is when people quit their job and just plan to relax for a while. What ??? You have a job you are making money, why would you give that up? I feel so lucky to have a job and to do something that isn't back breaking labor, I will never understand this and firmly feel like this is rich people stuff.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was afraid to seek mentorship from anyone above me, convinced that even asking would seem like bothersome begging. I watched the people around me network effortlessly, assured of favors and good words put in. I could only think in terms of what I could offer and how I could survive; they were thinking on the next level where they never had to wonder if they were good enough. They were to the business-class manner born, at least.
This one resonates very strongly with me, not sure if it's a poor-people characteristic though. It's anxiety but it may come out of the "poor person" mindset, I don't know.
From elementary school to uni, I never asked anything any teacher, or had a tutor, because they obviously have better things to do than talking with me. Like, isn't it just being polite?
It's definitely not anything to do with being poor. It's a confidence thing and having a will to learn and improve.
Throughout life we always learn from those who are more experienced. Your seniors are there specifically for seeking guidance.
You 100% should have spoken to teachers or tutors throughout school. Their job is to teach you and many of them enjoy sharing their knowledge and seeing someone want to better themsevles by going the extra distance to seek out information outside of the classroom.
Yes, sometimes people do have more important things to do. But no one is going to say "Go away, I don't care, I'm busy". They'll say "can we schedule this for another time?" and then you plan that.
Like, one of the most enjoyable things about my job is teaching other people things that I know and I think they can benefit from. I'll always have time for someone asking me question, it's never a bother. If someone else is blocked on work because they need help then I'll drop what I'm doing to aid them.
See it in a different way: all of those "mentor" type people, they have valuable knowledge in their heads. They have spent years and years building it up, refining their experiences and intuition etc. etc., you have the opportunity to go and ingest as much of that knowledge as possible at relatively no time expense!
As soon as I realized this, I started obsessively drilling their heads for every little scrap (up until the point they would start being annoyed with me). It's free!
More generally, I've noticed being reluctant to ask others to do things for me even when it's their job is an attitude I have that's hard to shake, and is probably a result of my low-ish social class upbringing. It feels rude or imposing. This extends to hiring people to clean or work on home improvement projects for me—it's hard not to want to help out when someone else is doing stuff for me, even if I'm paying them. I feel bad if I pay someone to mow my lawn. I very much doubt folks who grew up with lots of "help" around feel that way. I expect it'd be damn hard for me to run a business with employees, for similar reasons, at least until I got over the initial discomfort—it makes me feel really bad to pay someone to do something I could do myself, not just because I'm parting with money, but because it makes me feel like a lazy, rude asshole.
IME they mostly didn't know how to teach anything once someone fell off the rails of the curriculum. I quickly learned that, for whatever reason, the "normal" way things were taught didn't work for me. The people whose job it was to navigate it didn't know how to help me. I was fortunate to have parents who, despite not having much money, knew computers would be important and always kept us in a working computer and internet connection.
Even the early web in K-12 and early YouTube in tech school were more helpful because there were ways of teaching out there that worked for me, and I could find them. Math was the hardest because the teachers were mostly people who Just Got Math and didn't know how to help someone who didn't. They would get so into explaining something that they didn't hear me begging them to slow down so I could process it.
I have this issue too. As a youth I had a stutter and insecurity issues, which fell away when I realized my intellect was going to get me the hell away from the hick state I found myself. Through bravado and incredible luck, I managed to get a Harvard education - but while there nearly every single one of these insecurity issues cited in the article had a variation in my experience while attending Harvard. And after Harvard, I am barely and not really a member of the Harvard Network, primarily due to insecurity back then and being afraid to expose myself as not really being a Harvard Guy but some imposter hick.
If Harvard is anything like Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, it's not just that you didn't expose yourself, elite universities have their own stratification, between ones born rich who went to the most elite of private schools _before_ they went to university, where they likely _arrived_ with some connections already, and the ordinary public who got in through work and talent but can have anywhere from that level to absolutely nothing in terms of pre-existing connections and the learned social behaviours to then get them.
I started to sympathize and even being admirative at times, then it got darker.
One word: theft.
Taking advantage of free snacks, fine, it is what they are for. Taking stuff back home is borderline but ok. Not handing back the $350 headphones because no one is looking, definitely not ok. The way she described the situation as "everyone is rich so no need to lock thing up and check everything" instead of "people trust each other". The way she got her meal stolen 3 times in a previous job and didn't report it even though it is significant to her, as if theft was normal.
It is the attitude I noticed from someone who just got out of prison. A nice guy, but he got caught in gangs and drug trafficking. It took a while for him to get back into a world where people just trust each other, where "take it" means exactly that. He has a job is living a honest life now.
I hope that the author is fine now, that she managed to learn the lesson of poverty, keep the frugal attitude and respect for low paid workers while dropping the quasi-criminal thinking that goes with poverty.
Also, that she goes back to the gym, show these assholes who think she "doesn't belong" the finger and lost that fat that seems to weight her down in more way than one.
Also, how did we get to a situation where obesity and poverty are correlated? Really a paradox of the first world.
Seems to go both ways. Another paragraph described being the lowest paid worker. It seems that they asked her what sort of comp she was expecting, she produced a shockingly low number, and they just accepted the number and moved on. I think that’s basically unethical on the employer’s part. They should have basically ignored what she’d said and offered something they thought was reasonable (obviously that still advantages people who go into the negotiation in a better position, but it doesn’t feel so grossly unfair). Is what they did theft? Strictly speaking no, but it feels no better than any other scam taking advantage of lack of information to get a massive discount. When I was first interviewing for jobs, I asked a friend of mine (in a somewhat related role elsewhere) how much money I should ask for and it’s a good job they never asked me how much I wanted because his estimate was massively below what I was offered.
Are you sure? Because to me it read like it was an actual experience. I am confused now, and to be honest I feel a little deceived by it if it turns out to be fiction, because that's not how it's written and comes off (and since many people here seem to take it as a real experience, I don't think I'm being especially dimwitted here).
But again, I'm not sure that it's fiction? It's on the "blog" and most things just seem personal stuff like a typical blog?
I ate the free "cheetos" (unfortunately, they were actually peatos), the free breakfast, used the occasional paracetamol tablet, got too drunk at parties and ate half the canapés, said hi to the cleaners, couldn't work out why everyone was so into snowboarding, failed horribly at networking, had an android, lived in the needles and shootings part of the Tenderloin, was just over the obese BMI when I left, and have never had my teeth whitened.
I think those things are markers of the upper or upper-middle classes in the US, and if you're not from the US or from any other class, you don't have them. I haven't had to worry about bounced paychecks for a decade. My parents, solidly middle class, could have handled emergencies like a missed paycheck by dipping into their savings.
Funny story: the main investor at my previous startup was a multibillionaire, one of the richest men in Canada (via his captive VC fund). He came to visit us maybe 3–4 times, and each time he'd make a beeline for the goldfish crackers in our canteen.
> What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
I get the point of the quote, but it's not entirely true today. setting aside the existence of "premium colas", there is a higher tier of coca cola: the one that has actual cane sugar and is imported from mexico. if you order a coke at a nice restaurant, you will likely be served one of these. the imported version isn't prohibitively expensive, but it is uncommon to see poor people pay a premium for soda.
Back in 1975 that wasn't the case. But I guess it's another tiny symbol of increasing American inequality since then, we have special Coke for rich people now.
Assuming the trip to Greece was a joke was pretty good, as was the comment about hearing other people’s hobbies and just thinking about the expense. There are definitely cultural signifiers from wealth. Discussing housing endlessly is the biggest one.
Taking a 3 day vacation overseas definitely is a joke. You'll spend as much time sitting in a plane or waiting at the airport as you'll spend at your destination, how's that supposed to be relaxing?
Maybe from the US (unless you go to Cuba or the Caribbean). In Europe it makes total sense, even from far away Scandinavia. You can easily be in South of France before noon.
First/business class is not miserable, but it’s also not relaxing. For a three day trip, spending a whole day of it in airports or on a plane is not at all relaxing, no matter what class you’re flying. Personally, I draw the line at a week for non-business travel to Europe, and two weeks for Asia.
Since Concorde service was discontinued, business or first class passengers are not going to spend less time on board of the airplane than economy passengers.
12+ hours for each way quickly dampens the enthusiasm for the weekend.
I just looked it up and flights from SF to athens and back are almost 35 hours. Add in a few hours at each airport, an hour to/from the airport on each side and you're talking 40-45 hours of door to door round trip transit. That's insane.
The part that's the worst isn't being on the plane. It's going to and being at the airport. First class doesn't fix the god awful experience that is flying.
There are plenty of ways to make the airport part more pleasant with more money. Priority check-in desks and security mean you don't need to get to the airport as early just in case, it will be consistently fast. Priority boarding removes the need to queue. Leaving first probably means shorter queues at immigration. Lounges are much more pleasant to wait at than the general access areas. Does first class baggage also get offloaded first?
Bullshit. I know my share of wealthy people and nobody does that. Especially when you have plenty of vacation days to use anyway.
Las Vegas is 14-15h away from most European hubs. NYC is 8h. Even the best case scenario (first class and the airline staff walks you through immigration) means 10h door-to-door.
Bachelor parties or Boys weekends in Las Vegas is quite common for Londoners in some circles. Leave Friday and come back to work on Monday morning. It's not much different from a weekend Crete or Canary Islands or Weekend away in the Caribbean
Colleagues at work in the City didn't at least once or twice a month. Well not to Vegas/NYC (probably 2-3 a year) but Crete, Berlin, Ibiza for partying/clubbing many times etc. I can see it happening more now that companies are more open to remote work. You could work remotely from the place on Thursday/Friday and then party and come back on Monday morning
I have done it in the past went to Switzerland or Hong Kong for the weekend to buy things as it was cheaper to fly there then to buy the same product on the grey market in London (saved $3-5k).
You said that because you’re poor too. Rich people travel right into resorts, not specific places, because resorts sell you the dream directly.
I definitely saw the videos of those dreamy Greek hotels with in-room balcony pools and if I were rich I would know their names too. I’m sure that if you contact them you’ll just have to drive to SFO and the rest will be taken care of by them.
Well you say that because you haven't visited greece ;). It's not the "spa" type of tourism, and those kind of luxuries are usually sought after by spoiled arabian princes. The aspirational SV person would choose one of the many hotels, book trips and food tours around the islands, or hit the beaches and the nightlife. In fact all-inclusive hotels are geared towards pensioners and budget-level UK teenagers.
But it's certainly not possible to do those in 3 days with jetlag.
The rich people I know have their own vacation homes in nice places and/or make exotic travels where resorts are unusual and unneeded. Less rich people aren't usually interested in constrained luxury experiences like resorts and cruises; the closed environment doesn't compete well with freely experiencing a proper tourism hotspot and its varied attractions and extravagant luxury doesn't compete well with a better location or a longer stay with a cheaper, good enough accommodation.
Resorts are a specialty for amateurs or a resource for special cases (e.g. a safe environment in unfriendly locations like Egypt or Maldives).
Are indoor rock climbing and adult soccer known to be especially expensive activities? I haven't done much indoor rock climbing, but I've done a lot of adult soccer, mostly for free.
Indoor rock climbing for sure. A gym will cost you at least $50 a month (where I am, but I doubt it's that much different elsewhere), and the equipment costs aren't astronomical but do add up, especially compared to "cheap" sports (at least $200 for shoes / harness, and additional gear depending on what sort of climbing you want to do).
Right, but if they just started at that job, and they previously had worked for much lower pay, they wouldn't be exposed to indoor rock climbing much at all. I don't think the author is saying that they couldn't rock climb if they wanted to, it's just a very different context when people can suddenly have (relatively) expensive hobbies.
The indoor wall where I'm from was at a YMCA, which has financial assistance programs for people who qualify. On a tech salary the author would probably be looking at full price, but if she were still poor it'd be a cheaper option.
In my country the price to do adult soccer is "one soccer ball", many soccer fields are free, you just go and if no one is playing you can use it. The only problem is that you can't play at night because no one is going to turn on the light for you.
The fancier soccer fields with lights on cost 25€/hour, divided by 22 players it becomes just 1€ each ( and you still need to bring your ball )
Found that bit surprising one. For European startup long weekend in Greece isn't that special. The flights can be quite cheap and Greece generally isn't that expensive country. A few hundred all together could probably be done.
I’ve always been surprised by the flight costs of some European airlines. It seems cheaper to fly around Europe than it is to fly within the US. I recall during the peak of the pandemic some people I know posting pictures of $5 flights while in the US they were they were still 10-11 times that for domestic flights.
A lot of this list just reads that they have coworkers who are jerks. Not interacting with cleaning staff? That seems like a personal problem. And I’ve seen plenty of frugal VPs that drive 15 year old cars and make their own lunch.
That said, I was also pretty horrified once when I was waiting in the lunch line and heard the person in front of me complaining that their six month $100k bonus wasn’t as high as they thought it would be right as the person making their plate of free food handed it over to them. There’s always going to be at least some rude, thoughtless people; the best thing you can do is to try to avoid hiring them.
I think an important aspect is that, even if you're frugal, there's signifiers of class that you can easily 'turn on'. I'm pretty frugal myself (I drive a 15 year old hand-me-down from my parents, have the cheapest phone that will still function, and generally avoid buying anything new ever), but my upbringing was fairly comfortable. But I can definitely recognize that I'm able to fit in upper class settings, and can recognize easily when people can't.
I think it's fair to say that an SF-based tech startup is a place where you're going to see a lot of these upper class signifiers.
You shouldn't be horrified at that complaint. If a company hints that it's going to be 150k when they hire you and it ends up being 100k that is a valid complaint. You are just perpetuating the don't talk about pay rule which benefits the company over the workers.
I agree that one shouldn’t discourage one’s coworkers from making such complaints.
I think the person you replied to was not necessarily horrified at the complaint to a fellow engineer. They were horrified that the complaint was made within earshot of a cafeteria server, who might envy the engineer for even having the chance to make that much money. I think the principle behind that horror is “it’s rude to avoidably inspire envy in others”.
I've seen this before. Not often, because the companies I have worked at have rarely hired someone from this social strata. But in the cases where we have, I have seen the alienation.
Aside from the obvious "be genuinely friendly", does anyone have suggestions of what to do as a coworker to support someone suffering from this cultural barrier?
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I made more there than I’d ever made before; a daring amount I had been afraid to ask for during the offer process. I discovered through misadventure that I still made less than any of the executive assistants, or the receptionist. I was, in fact, the lowest-paid person in the building including the interns. I hadn’t known what was possible, so I couldn’t even think to ask for what I was worth to them.
One of the largest issues which would have caused many of the others on the list seems to be that they were absurdly underpaid. So make sure your co-workers aren't making peanuts compared to you?
Yeah, it clearly made all involved people uncomfortable. If I knew this I would have serious questions for my next HR one-on-one: "I am not going to work next to an exploited person - are you going to pay up or should I take the next recruiter call I get today?"
Sure. First thank you for the honest question. I was poor growing up. Many things on this list resonate with me, but I'll add a few others.
> During middle school, I would often skip lunch altogether.
> The first time I went on an out-of-state trip was during college.
> I went snowboarding (for the first time) with some friends a few years ago (age 24) and they didn't even balk at the $500 / night room prices for the all inclusive resort.
> I now feel rich because my car's check engine light is not on.
Ways you can help with this:
* Understand that your coworkers may not have the same experiences as you. If someone tells a joke ("Summering in the Cayman islands" [referencing tax evasion or similar]), perhaps pull them aside later, one on one, and explain why the particular thing was funny.
* Talk about the last book you read. Why was it interesting to you? Poor people and rich people read very different books. Offering insight into whatever issues you read through books might help them have easier conversations with others. For example I'm currently reading "An American sickness" which discusses the rising cost of health care in America. A poor person would focus on why *their* individual healthcare is so expensive, but a rich person looks at the whole system. And that is what this book more or less discusses.
It's not unlike learning a foreign language. Even if you memorize the words and phrases, there's all sorts of ways they are used that can make it difficult to use as a communication tool. Try to identify those odd words or phrases and explain those to others. However this can apply to any company / culture, its not necessarily a rich / poor thing.
Include them. Invite them to lunch, introduce them to other coworkers, make sure they know about happy hour events or other after-work activities. A few people doing this for me in my early 20s made the world of difference in my life.
Other then underpaid like in the other comment another way is to expose yourself out of the bubble. Volunteering if done right can expose you out of it.
Adopt a mentee. They need a teacher. Remember that when you offer guidance, it needs to be comprehensible and actionable and directed towards a coherent goal.
Telling someone to reflect, for example, is none of those. Instead, tell someone to remember that what people show and what people feel can be different when they assume about another's mental state based on appearances.
I don't have much in the way of general advice other than "try to be inclusive toward people whose experiences and circumstances may not be like yours", in much the same way as male allies should be aware of things that can make women feel unsafe, omnivores should be aware that some folks have dietary restrictions, and so on.
Money can pop up as an excluding factor pretty easily. So, for example, insist on a hard (and low, ideally ridiculously low) upper bound on any expenses associated with optional-but-not-really events like gift exchanges or potluck meals. A company-culture norm of spending higher amounts on such things can cause a lot of stress, even if the amounts are still affordable: ie. figuring out a $25 Secret Santa gift is easier than a $50, much less $75, one.
Advocate for open salaries in your company. Everyone should know what everyone else makes, or at the very least, what the bands for every position / level of seniority make. Information asymmetry in pay is never to the benefit of the employees, only the employers - so why have it?
They. I kept seeing the word "they", and wondering about it. Was it really every single person in the company that thought you were joking about your GED, or was it a handful that you told?
Attributing the actions of a few individuals to an entire group is a quick way to engender feelings of alienation in yourself. Pro tip: don't do that.
I think "they" is best understood as an indicator of the author's mindset. When you feel like an outsider, it's very easy to feel that the whole of the group is unified against you.
> > I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I made more there than I’d ever made before; a daring amount I had been afraid to ask for during the offer process. I discovered through misadventure that I still made less than any of the executive assistants, or the receptionist. I was, in fact, the lowest-paid person in the building including the interns. I hadn’t known what was possible, so I couldn’t even think to ask for what I was worth to them.
A lot of these issues would probably have been fixed if they just earned market rate. It seems that they were very underpaid. It is unsurprising that they felt poor when they earned the least of anyone in the company.
This person is writing from a lifetime of being poor, not being cash poor in-the-moment because of a salary.
This article resonates strongly with me. I grew up poor, too, and even though I have a 7 figure net worth now one of the first things I consider for anything is the cost. I don't have to, but I still do. I eat the low rent snacks and I use the company's daily cafeteria allowance to eat a sensible lunch and then take the rest home to share with the family. Being poor in America isn't just about money--it's about the psychological barriers and oppression that are erected.
Yes, but the person I responded to never had to, except perhaps to consider how often rather than whether. Those with generational wealth never had to for any reason. Those are important differences in context.
harder to negotiate a good deal for yourself when you are operating at an information disadvantage (e.g. not having friends/family/former classmates as peers in industry to give insider advice), if you don't have good alternative to employer lowball offer, or you are in poorer negotiating position due to having fewer resources (cash, time, higher expenses due to not having enough cash & stability to secure cheaper long term accommodation, etc).
"Meg Elison is a California Bay Area author and essayist"
Many people will warn you about taking drugs or dropping out of school. Far too few people will warn you about becoming an author or moving to the Bay Area.
The trick to being the only poor person is to not let on. Once people know, they exploit the hell out of you. They don't seem to do it consciously; somehow it just happens. I made that mistake a few times during my time in SF.
Also, I think that most people have some unconscious bias that associate your apparent wealth level as a proxy for your competence level.
People inherently trust more the judgement of people they think are rich. If you avoid looking obviously poor, you'll find out that you'd be given better assignments, more freedom, that your mistakes won't be scrutinized as much.
The day you find this out and act accordingly, it is like as if you were black and them suddenly find out you woke white one day. All the invisible barriers, the glass ceiling, are subtly not there anymore.
Yes, like racism, classism sucks. But you have only one life, your time is short, and while we must fight to try to change things, you'd also better be smart and try to work around classism just by not giving obvious clues about you have ever been poor.
I'd say the difference is that Americans are obsessed with money, and they think you need to flaunt it just because you have it. The idea of having a rusty old beater car, let alone bike to work, if you're rich just baffles them.
Status and class here is much more subtle, you often can't tell from the way a person dresses (at least at first glance) and what he drives if he's a billionaire or secretary.
I'm guessing lower pay, larger workloads, etc. I'm not surprised that many managers/founders will exploit your fears to get more work out of you for less. Same way that those on an H1B get the short end of the stick.
It's good to recognize that there is a monoculture in tech and that not all of us fit into that monoculture. We should strive to be more inclusive, and we can only do that if those who are marginalized or alienated can speak out and be heard.
About half of this sounds like "I knew I was the only not-fabulously-wealthy person at my tech startup."
I grew up in a quantitatively upper class home, and I'd still feel like an alien around the people the author is describing.
I think this person is suffering more than they need to (while being offensively underpaid) because they happen to be in a particularly weird and wealthy bubble.
I understand the point of the article. It's worth reading. But for anyone out there who is also poor: no, most people at tech companies are not like this, even the ones who make $500k/year and come from wealthy families.
If you're poor but also have tech skills and are in the bay area, I would recommend working at a public tech company for a while first - then you're no longer poor and can afford to work at a risky startup.
That's all I could think about when reading this post.
edit: Maybe the point of the post was not losing touch with reality or becoming an ass to people when you start making money (which I can agree with), but they also came off a bit self-righteous to me.
> Nobody had walked me away from my desk to keep me from stealing pens or staples or secrets.
Are you saying poor people are always dishonest so by trusting you they treated you like a rich person, which is bad because ?? . Honestly I'm just confused.
The article is about how poverty isn't just a financial situation but a shrinking of your world view.
The author isn't complaining about that situation. She finds herself being surprised by it, and then noticing her own surprise begins contemplating what it might mean.
I guess it means that poor people are continually treated as if they are thieves or guilty of something, and after being treated that way for so long, you internalize that judgement and treat yourself that way. Then when you notice a situation where you're not being treated that way, you might be surprised, and feel a mixture of emotions about the fact that you have been seeing yourself as guilty and untrustworthy for so long, and for no reason other than that you're poor.
Reading your other comments you seem quite defensive about the fact that she doesn't have any real reason for saying rich people are so bad. But nowhere in the article does she actually say rich people are bad. She's saying why being poor sucks, what it feels like to go from being poor to being a bit better off, what that other world looks like from the outside or, more broadly, how your economic circumstances shape your view of the world and your expectations and interactions in it.
I don't know why you would insist on reading it as some sort of attack.
I just find it so tedious when people spend their energy complaining, instead of making the best of their situation. At least when their situation is as good as hers.
I think what the author is getting at is that at many office jobs that lower-class folks work at, on your last day you'll be "walked out" by security to make sure you don't steal anything, "cause a scene," etc. The implication is that this is something that happens to lower-class workers, but not upper-class workers. And the "lower-class" job comes with low pay, and thus: poor. That's the logical connection I get when reading it.
As someone who used to work in a "lower-class" (and low-pay) tech job (outsourced tech support, but the outsourcing firm was in America) - this is how they treated employees when they resigned (and when they were fired). It resonated with me, and I do not think it's a particularly rare thing in "lower-class" white-collar work.
No, she's saying people perceive the poor as being dishonest and prone to thievery and therefore treat them as a group in a manner reflecting that.
To be poor in America is to be lesser, not quite human, really. And our society is built from the top down to kindle that as early as possible, and to reinforce it at every stage of life.
Why would it be bad? Most of the list doesn't attack the "rich", in my opinion. It just highlights the difference between the subjective experiences, but I don't see as a vale judgement on anyone.
What is the point of the "nobody thought I would steal their stuff" comment then? It only makes sense if you assume poor people are thieves. In this case it was correct, but I don't think it's true in general.
I’ve worked “poorer” jobs. They’ve been concerned with office supplies walking off. Never a concern at higher paid tech offices in my limited experience.
I grew up poor(but no longer am). I can sympathize with some of the things she wrote, but not very many. I too talk to the janitor and cleaners. I once had a job like that.
What strikes me is that she describes a work-life that are quite a few years long, perhaps even decades, and she still is dirt poor apparently.
I know that no-one just gives money away, but how come she lives a frugal life and after years of working still is extremely poor?
Her writing makes me think she thinks like a beaten dog. Either she is exaggerating/lying or she has some other problems that are not actually money-related.
She does say she is paid less then everyone else in the company and it seems she lives in San Fransisco, so it doesn't seem like too much of stretch to me
Some of this is poor people stuff but some of it strikes me more as depression/low self-esteem. Of course one can lead to the other and that may be the case for the author, but it’s not only poor people who feel depressed or suffer with low self-esteem so some of it seemed out of place.
Obviously examples like the guy who didn’t notice his paycheque bouncing are a sign people around you are wealthy though.
> Obviously examples like the guy who didn’t notice his paycheque bouncing are a sign people around you are wealthy though.
That means you’re wealthy now. I grew up fairly poor but with 10+ years in the industry I probably wouldn’t notice a missing paycheck for a while. I’m making 5-10x more than as a teenager. Doesn’t mean I grew up as some kind of an aristocrat
I like that this person is not judging, merely describing their observations.
Often I don't think wealthy people are aware how poor people interpret their actions, and I'm not arguing that they are required to either.
I've somewhat seen both sides of this, and I think it's beneficial for both sides to understand where the other is coming from..
It'll make a poor person feel better knowing that the behaviour they saw was not intended to demonstrate anything, that this rich person is just unaware that what they did could be perceived like whatever.
It'll also make a wealthy person understand averse reactions better, and avoid them, to understand how those who have less can interpret their actions.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was the only person who would say hello to the cleaning lady as she meekly made her rounds around us when we worked late. Everyone else had a long habit of ignoring anyone like her.
I hate people that do this. We’re all human and worthy of respect and decency. A simple hello goes a long way.
I happen to be that sort of people that ignores people at work (whenever possible). That has nothing to do with my attitude/sentiment towards them. It's that being at work, most of the time I'm just absorbed, having something on my mind that I want to pay attention to. In that state I'd rather ignore everything and everyone around me, but I can't. Not answering to greetings from my peers would damage relations with them in the long run (not to mention that that greeting may be just an opener to something actually work related), and not answering to people higher up the chain of management would definitely have negative consequences, so I'm kind of forced to react to them. But then if sometime late the cleaning personnel happen to pass by, looking less like wanting to socialize with those at desks and more like wishing to get their tasks done and be over with, should both of us attempt to pay the time and effort of maintaining a human connection just for the sake of it?
I definitely agree that being mean to the staff (be it cleaning lady, waiter, etc) is a very bad sign of someone's character.
That said, if I were cleaning an office building I don't think I would want everyone chatting me up - just kindly get out of my way when I'm trying to clean something but otherwise I don't see it as rude to not engage with me when I'm doing my job.
I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because everyone else had good teeth.
No joke. I grew up with free government dental, and it took years of earning to get at least presentable teeth. Not smiling for years doesn't help your work prospects.
Are you talking about alignment or whiteness here? I'm just confused as I thought even government dental would allow for braces, and it would be weird to whiten a child's teeth.
I'm not from America and lucked into never needing braces or any dental work at all other than cleanings so I don't know much about this.
Both, IHS had issues. One of those issues was a botched root canal that took three operations to fix. When you don't/ cannot fire incompetents and just move them to another site, it makes things less than optimal.
It is definitely not expensive to play soccer in the US, unless this is another weird Bay Area thing. To play in an official rec league like she mentioned does have a bit more cost associated, but in NYC area every league I've seen is < $100 for the season, which will usually span 3 months. Compared to the cost of playing pickup that's expensive, but it's also definitely not a rich person hobby. The cost of a few streaming services or buying a few video games over the course of the year will be more than playing a season or two of soccer.
> For example, one of the reasons that soccer/football is popular worldwide is because it's very cheap. Is it not so in the US?
It is relatively cheap in the US as far as I know, but it's not nearly as common as basketball for pickup sports. I think the racial / class connections here are fascinating (and too lengthy to dissect here), but my general sense in the US is that soccer is actually perceived as more "other" / "foreign" than other sports.
> Also the assumption that everyone takes painkillers?
People who come up from lower-class backgrounds often have chronic pain - being overweight is one reason (as alluded to in this article), which is strongly correlated with income/class levels in the US. But also the work that one might do as a lower-class person in the US is different, and tends to be more physically stressful. That can add up to back/knee/neck injuries that never quite heal correctly and cause pain.
To expand on this a bit the average (and many even most) poor person in America will be obese AND will have to stand a large portion of the day. Imagine your cashier at your grocery store who is not allowed to have a chair at most places in America or the fast food crew running around the Kitchen.
The combination of being overweight (and sadly the author has a lot of photos so you can see she suffers more than just the average obese person) and being on your feet most of the day leads to a culture of OTC pain killers. I come from a poor background. There are two things I can guarantee about the BBQ I go to this weekend. 1) We are all going to have at least 30 pounds on us we shouldnt and 2) EVERY woman there is going to have a bottle of Aleve in her purse to the point where I wouldn't bother trying to find my wife when my inevitable back pain starts in, I will just turn and ask whichever woman is nearby with her purse in hands and I know already she's going to say "Oh of course sweety, here you go" as she pulls out two Aleve for me.
>It is relatively cheap in the US as far as I know, but it's not nearly as common as basketball for pickup sports.
In the US, while less broadly true today, poor has often been associated with urban. And basketball is probably easier in an urban environment than soccer/football, at least with anything approaching a standard playing field. It's also just never been a very popular US sport although at some point, it became mildly popular among the suburban soccer mom demographic, among others, for various reasons.
> soccer/football is popular worldwide is because it's very cheap
Cheap, in terms of money. Expensive, in terms of time. Due to the lack of money to make time available, the poor often have no time for such diversions (even as children, since someone needs to pay the dues and take the child to practice/matches).
Also, if you're like most lower class Americans, you're likely selling your physical labor/wellbeing for a living, making more physical activity after work unappealing.
This hits hard. I can remember landing my first job in SF as a poor kid from the midwest who had only ever worked menial labor before. For the first few weeks I would leave my Macbook at the office every night, because I was incredulous to the fact that an employer would let me take home a $3,000 laptop.
So I opened the About on the website and I can't quite put my finger on it, but the author is exactly who I imagined her to be after finishing the article.
I agree that her coworkers are mostly jerks, but it sounds like she too may not be the most pleasant person to keep around.
I stormed back to the website, arms filled with pitchforks ready to hand out, and was completely let down by the most tame About Me section my mind could have possibly summoned. I know you say you cant put your finger on it but can you elaborate a little bit?
For those of you too lazy to click through to it here is the text (followed by a bunch of photos of her in different fancy outfits/settings):
Meg Elison: Author & Essayist
Meg Elison is a California Bay Area author and essayist. She writes science fiction and horror, as well as feminist essays and cultural criticism. She is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards finalist. Her work has been on the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree) longlist, nominated for the Audie Award, and won the Philip K. Dick Award. She has also been published in McSweeney’s, Shimmer, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Catapult, Terraform, and many other places.
She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) and the National Writers Union (@paythewriter).
Her debut novel, "The Book of the Unnamed Midwife" won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. She has been an Otherwise Award honoree twice. Her YA debut, “Find Layla” was published in fall 2020 by Skyscape. It was one of Vanity Fair's Best 15 Books of 2020.
Elison is a high school dropout, a graduate of UC Berkeley, and writes like she’s running out of time.
> "..because I couldn’t restrain myself from eating and drinking myself into an absolute sickness anytime they threw a party and expressed no limits on our consumption, ..because I had the only fat body in the building, ..because I never got over not having to punch a clock, ..because I had gotten married younger than any of my coworkers.."
Having an eating disorder, being obese, being insecure about an early marriage and taking the time to notice people blowing their money away is not exclusive to poor people. I've been below the poverty line and grew up in a strapped-for-cash household, and I don't see how the author is making a point, or what having to be in tech has to do with it.
I don't understand the post because I identify with every single point of their claims of being poor in tech, and I'm not poor, and am in tech. Perhaps the author is simply an outsider in their bubble, rather than actually poor?
One of the parts that most stood out to me was how the author was apparently paid much less that her comparably-skilled coworkers, since she didn't negotiate for higher pay. How common is this in tech companies in and around San Francisco? Are there a lot that would pay you as little as possible--even far below what is common for your skill set--if you didn't defend yourself through negotiation and awareness of market value for your skills? Was it more that she didn't ask for enough, or that her coworkers were much more aggressive negotiators?
I'd assume, though, that a tech writer's base salary would be higher than a receptionist's and maybe an executive assistant's. I'm trying to gauge if she was being vastly underpaid for her skill set and if Bay Area tech companies tend to do that if you don't negotiate aggressively.
When I was starting out I didn’t take the jobs in Boston or SF because I couldn’t conceive of paying such high rents. I knew that if I stumbled and lost a job that I’d be stuck in an apartment that I couldn’t afford. So I didn’t go. I took the crappy jobs with crappy people in crappy towns while working on my own projects.
Moved to NYC. Tried to meet with investors but had a hard time getting meetings because I wasn’t in any of the networks. Not a soul was impressed. I made $180k in profit the year after launching my company. “Who cares? I could just raise money and crush you.”
Was injured and lost my company because I didn’t have a safety net. Had to leave NYC for a few years while I rebuilt.
When I was young my school and early jobs were the issue. Now that I’m in my mid-thirties the fact that I haven’t been funded before is the issue. There’s always going to be a reason to exclude you. Why bother?
Today I just make companies that make money and I don’t even think about investors or the startup “scene”. I’m even leaving NYC (again) to move back to my “crappy” hometown.
Being poor in tech means that there are no reinforcements coming to help you. It also might mean making it and realizing that you don’t have any interest in the idea of “it” anymore.
> once I realized they would keep restocking the tampons in the ladies’ room, I stopped bringing any from home. I said as much in a fit of daring to a woman with whom I thought I would become friends. She admonished me for using bleached cotton products in my vagina. We are not friends.
More evidence that the "sisterhood" is a total myth.
"Because they have never been poor, they had no idea what I might do. Why would I steal, when everyone clearly has enough?"
The assertion that "poor people are more likely to be dishonest" betrays a view of poor people that isn't very nice. Rich people are just as likely to steal if they think they can get away with it.
One thing that stuck out to me was how a lack of certain skills or knowledge played into keeping them poor in this position.
If they'd known the salaries of other people they could have negotiated for more pay up front. Even once they knew they were the lowest paid person they weren't comfortable bringing it up and trying to negotiate for more. They lacked the confidence or people skills to ask for mentorship from the people they worked with. None of this is helped by the fact that being broke takes brain power just to get by so you can't apply that effort and energy into improving your situation.
Many of us are lucky enough to have someone in our lives who could teach us these things. Is there a way we can make sure this kind of knowledge is passed on more equitably to help reduce intergenerational wealth gaps?
My boss once said to me “oh that must drive your cleaning lady nuts” and I just pretended like it did instead of saying that I or my wife take care of it.
I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was the only person who would say hello to the cleaning lady as she meekly made her rounds around us when we worked late. Everyone else had a long habit of ignoring anyone like her.
Never fucking do this. Learn the name of everyone who comes into the office, greet them, and if they have a foreign native language, learn to say hello in it.
I absolutely remember and judge those of you who treat your fellow humans like furniture. I see you. There will never not be a moment that I remember this, no matter how groovy you are, no matter your political posturing, no matter your accomplishments.
"I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was the only person who would say hello to the cleaning lady as she meekly made her rounds around us when we worked late."
This is just good manners.
"I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I forgot my charger once and absolutely nobody had one old enough to be compatible with my phone."
Taking good care of what you have is pure class. Always buying the latest is middle class behavior.
"I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I never got over not having to punch a clock."
I would love to punch a clock instead of reporting time in Jira.
The people identifying this person's complaints as irrational ("he's not poor anymore") or over the top don't quite get where they're coming from. I know many people who are now well off that still have this mindset or remnants of it. I'm a first generation immigrant, my own parents will spend long amounts of time explaining to me that we are not as wealthy as other people and shouldn't forget it, because they won't. Her favourite restaurants all have three Michelin stars. When it stops being physical, it's completely psychological.
Agree. Strongly dislike this American sentiment of self victimisation. If you are born in USA you are not poor. If you are born in USA and work in tech, you are not poor even relative to other Americans.
I mean most of the world (including me) dream of having an opportunity to migrate to USA, because living there is enormous privilege to have
Where does it say she owned a MacBook? She had one belonging to her workplace, but I've worked minimum-wage jobs where I've used equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars before.
Being poor stinks (even more when you're constantly reminded of it), but it's not something to be ashamed of. Not sure exactly what I'd've done in such an environment but probably would've tried to learn what I could from others, and try to just be a friend. If learning I was poor would make them ashamed of me, then the real problem is being surrounded by judgmental a-holes all day, not really being poor. (And unfortunately there are judgmental a-holes in all walks of life, rich and poor.)
As someone from a poorer (not poor, we live in the UK and nobody is poor here) background, I can relate to some of this. But a lot of it is way off the mark. As I read further it sounded more and more like a woe is me piece.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because nobody else ate the Hot Cheetos that were stocked in our free snack kitchen
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I couldn’t restrain myself from eating and drinking myself into an absolute sickness anytime they threw a party and expressed no limits on our consumption
That's not being poor. That's being fat.
> Payday was marked in all caps on my calendar, every biweekly occurrence, forever.
That's not being poor. That's being bad with money.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I wouldn’t dream of Ubering in.
That's not being poor. That's being good with money.
> I gave back the Macbook. I kept the headphones.
That's not being poor. That's being a thief.
Overall I think coming from a poorer background is great for happiness. My girlfriend is from a similar background. We really enjoy small things that other people would take for granted. We've surpassed the quality of life we had growing up easily, so everything else is a bonus. If I were to write an article like this, it would be because I felt sorry for the "not poor" people, not to make people feel sorry for me.
Jumping across the class divide in the US can definitely engender culture shock.
I'm reminded of a passage by Barack Obama:
"We have to figure out how to live together, and we have to figure out if we can do this free of caste systems and the inevitable conflict that the kind of social stratification that has existed for most of human history creates. That genie is out. We’re past the time in which some peasant in a feudal system is starving and looks up on the palace and there’s a king somewhere, and the peasant thinks, Yeah, that’s okay. Now all those peasants have phones and they can see how the lord of the manor is eating, and some of them are going to say, “Why him instead of me?” The willingness to accept one’s fate or lot in life because of your skin color or gender or religion or sexual orientation—that you are going to accept being less than someone else—that’s over."
As I've grown older, I've become more acutely aware of the tremendously unfair and largely indelible disparity that's inherent to being human.
I seems like, controlling for epoch, one's parents essentially determine the vast majority of a life outcome: some weighted combination of where they live, how wealthy they are, what genes they pass on to you, and how they raise you. Just about everyone in tech is the beneficiary of an insanely lucky dice roll.
Reflecting on that makes me deeply uncomfortable. The idea that my position in this world really boils down to a stroke cosmic fortune.
But it's also a source of deep empathy, and I try my best to carry that with me into any interaction with someone occupying a different rung on the socioeconomic ladder. Mostly I find it's about treating people with dignity and working to build them up in whatever small way you can. That might be as simple as a "thank you" or as involved as a conversation in which you listen to someone's story. There's much to be gained from practicing compassion.
Reminds me of John Scalzi's masterful Being Poor (written as a rejoinder to those who were asking why the poor in New Orleans didn't just up and leave when Hurricane Katrina arrived):
Not talking to the cleaning person is just rude and mean. Seems to me if no-one else in the office does it, that's an opportunity to be the person that changes things. If one person starts talking to the cleaning lady/man, other people probably will. Or if they look at you weird for doing so (yeah to be honest this sadly did happen to me) then ** 'em, they need to learn. As for free stuff, hey, if the company wants to give away free stuff, its our moral duty to use it, right? ;) If like the author we're struggling to make ends meet, then we should take whatever free stuff we can use. If we don't technically "need" it, well how about pass it on to someone else who does. Or give extra money to charity. Really, why be embarassed to be the only person using free stuff. Will people really deep down judge you? If they really do, go work somewhere else with better people ;)
> Gym membership was included in my benefits. I went half a dozen times before it was made crystal clear to me that I did not belong.
I would be curious about this one. What did happened in the gym? Not really doubting, some people in gyms are quite unfriendly when you dont look fit. But I am still curious what happened there.
The gym I went to had almost exclusively very fit people, who obviously exercised a lot.
When I started out I was fairly overweight and completely out of shape, could barely do a couple of pushups, and I felt very uncomfortable and out of place.
However the others just did their programs, and I never got any looks or comments. So after a while I managed to relax and just get on with my own stuff.
I would imagine you got it right with the "get out of the gym if you are not already fit". It's amazing how badly people act towards people starting out on their fitness.
I've never seen it happen in person either. As someone who used to be terrified of going to the gym because I didn't want to look like the new person at the gym, I can say for myself that it was all in my head.
"..you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do." - David Foster Wallace
Literally seen this almost all the time at three different gym places...
I went to the gym I was asked to come back "later" as "the gym is near full (50% full actually) and we prefer 'regulars' to come and train for something instead of... kind of you...".
So, if I am like you - just seeing with my own eyes and not follow the feeling and facts from other persons - I would say that gym regulars are just full of s*** :)
I’ve been working out regularly for 20+ years in a gym and have never seen it either. If anything, I’ve seen the opposite, the super-fit go out of their way to encourage those who are unfit or just starting because they know the difficulties. I’ve literally never even been given a weird look when asking if I can work in on equipment even with the most intimidating gym rats. And this includes me doing a number of gym faux pas early.
I’m sure legitimate bad experiences do happen, but I also think a lot of perception is based on the stories we make up in our own heads.
Ironically (for this thread), all the private rich-person gyms I've been to have mostly been populated by people who were not in good shape, and everybody was very friendly.
But these were also "health clubs" in the old school sense, not a fancy gym like Equinox where I would never even set foot.
Edit: I also have heard enough gym bullying stories to believe that it can and does happen, but it seems maybe only under circumstances that I have never been in.
Was in a gym that put signs on the wall admonishing people from commenting on those trying to get in shape. They were not getting the new members they wanted.
I have seen adults being hostile to fat people. Both in face and behind back. I don't think stigma is in obese persons head. I was curious about what went on in that gym specifically.
I don't know if is something about "small town" gyms. But in the gym I used to go when I was younger, the owner of the gym was also a global personal trainer, he will follow every person that joins the gym ( for free ), he will tell you what exercise do today and will follow you if the exercise is new or he notices you don't know how to do it properly, he will also help you with diet and everything in between. The other members of the gym were also very friendly and supportive, congratulating with you for every little advancement like "you look slimmer compared to a week ago"
When I moved to London I was never able to found a gym with that environment.
in my experience at the gym, you don't need to communicate with anyone at all. you take the free equipment, you lift, you make sure to put everything in its place, you shower and go home. wtf?
Direct communication isn't required to create a hostile environment. Sly looks, offhand remarks overheard while trying to do an exercise, etc.--they pile up. And poor people especially are conditioned to be mindful of this sort of thing. It's often dangerous (as in, an altercation that can become physical might occur) not to be when in public.
poor people also tend to be accustomed to harsh environments (bad neighbourhood, bad school etc) so mindful, maybe yes, but actually stressed to the level that you leave and miss out on smth you have the right to, I don't know...
Just say no to the gym, go out to a nearby forest and exercise there. A friend of mine (who I used to go jogging with) did that. He always found a suitable tree branch and that's all he needed for pull-ups. All other exercises can be done in nature too. It's gonna be healthier and cheaper, I assure you.
I used to be a "gym rat" but the general "guy culture" at most gyms is thinly veiled bully behavior. I can not count the number of times I interrupted normal, buff, and outright fat guys giving less-than-babe-status women grief. I finally found myself getting prepared for anger when going to the gym, and after switching gyms a number of times I gave up and now work out in parks and at home, away from the public assholes that ruin it for all but the beautiful.
I identify with this article more in a meta-level of how much mental bandwidth one loses to the overhead of having been born
poor:
All those things you worry when you didn't came from a well-to-do family rob mental processing time, thus making it harder to use your time productively to escape further and faster from poverty.
Rich people for example probably never ever entertain those worst case thoughts someone who was born poor usually obsess from time to time, like, "what if this recession I saw on news deepens, I am laid off and can't find a job for months, maybe years? will I become homeless? will my family have food?".
This is mental processing time that wealthy people can use to be creative, to learn something new, to have fun, but for you, it is about a couple hours of extreme anxiety where you can't concentrate enough even to work.
A lot of these things I don't consider signs of being poor but signs that you aren't throwing away your money. Sure you can be poor and frugal but I would bet a lot of those people are racking up tons of credit card debt because they are betting on their stock being worth something eventually.
How much of that experience is true in USA startup scene? I feel like this might be a special case for SF. Because here in Canada most of the people who work at tech aren’t rich at all and they tend to be more nerdy than snobby. I guess fintech scene might be more classist though.
This happens everywhere in the world. Also among more "normally" paid teams.
Look out for it and you will realize. In my experience, there is always someone who has a very hard life (money or time) and you do not even realize but hurt them without bad intent.
None of it's reflective of my decade plus working in the bay area. I think I've met just a couple people like that. There are almost certainly social bubbles like that, though, but that's not the vast majority of us.
Leave SF, problem solved. Why anyone would choose to live in a city where a closet living space costs what houses do in much of the rest of the country is beyond me.
If that's what you want then fine but don't start crying to everyone else that you can't afford a living in one of the most overpriced markets in the world and you don't fit in with the elitists.
And... the reality is that this woman's perception of poor is a standard of living that a large portion of the world doesn't even dream of. It's understandable to be upset because people only have so many experiences in their own little bubble but keep yourself in check and maybe consider that putting things like this out on the internet just make you look spoiled.
This is probably the single most relatable post linked on Hacker News for me. She gets it. She gets my mind set. I've been in tech for 20 years now (grew up poor, used to clean the tech-workers' cubicles as a kid so my parents could make it on time to their 3rd jobs, immigrant). The other day I was talking with co-workers at lunch, about how my major goal (at 40) was to finally pay off my mortgage ($194K) in the next 5 years. There was a long awkward silence, and lots of confused looks exchanged. Apparently, I must have been and continue to be chronically underpaid.
I am in board with this lady. Flaming Cheetos are awesome. I would take one or two for the road from work. I realized I should take whatever is on the party table if I am hungry. Unless it is named. Great job for putting in the hard work to show up at the gym. You can't say, oh she is fat and exclude her when she is putting in the effort. The 3 day trip to Greece, sailing as a hobby, I can go on. Kudos to her and doing the hard job is carrying on and pushing through.
A case proving her point is the negative comments in this thread.
I wouldn't consider myself poor or having grown up poor. I identify with many of the points on this list. I make less than many of my coworkers and my career has stagnated. I sometimes wonder if it has to do with this cultural gap. It seems like it's usually the people with an expensive image that are the ones who get promoted. Meanwhile I'm doing basically anything to save money and trying to leave work on time so I can watch the kid while my wife goes to work in the evening.
I won't say there's no bias (I'm sure it exists everywhere), but I think it's not an "expensive image" that gets you promoted as much as confidence.
Many people who grew up rich have a natural confidence to them (because they are protected if they lose their job, have been told they'll be someone important one day, given lots of help in life), and that helps a lot in giving a vibe that you'll succeed.
The great thing is that the confidence can be gained even if you didn't grow up in the same circumstances, it just takes more work.
I've gone the other direction. The company has screwed me over enough that I know life is shitty and all the stuff teachers and parents tell you growing up is a lie. The confidence didn't help me anyways (due to politics) as I'm 9 years in and only a midlevel dev, even though I've worked in roles above my current one (senior dev, tech lead, ASC). Most of the people in the office talk about fancy expensive things. If you don't participate in that lifestyle, there's little connection.
A lot of companies hire remotely these days, or are totally remote (Gitlab comes to mind).
Two things I would recommend if you are open to advice:
1. Consider the possibility that you have some skills to grow to achieve more senior levels. Confidence helps, but it's not enough on it's own.
2. Interview at other companies that don't require you to relocate to see what you're worth - switching jobs is (sadly) one of the easiest ways to get promoted or a pay raise.
1. I'm not posting for senior roles. I know I have more to learn about the new technologies since I'm switching stacks. It's not just confidence that makes me think I was performing at that level. The olny reason I wasn't officially given the title is because of politics and poor leadership by my superiors. I had people from other teams calling me a tech lead, a commendation letter from another team due to my involvement in an enterprise wide upgrade, my supervisor said she wanted me to get the highest performance rating but couldn't make it happen (political reasons), and everyone on the team treated me like the tech lead and even called me that. For the senior developer year, it was pretty similar but since we had an official tech lead hired on I let him handle half the elevations and half the interaction with other teams. My manager even said when he gets a new task that's highly technical and difficult, he gives it me or the tech lead. I met some people from outside my team offsite by chance. We were talking about work stuff pretty regularly. They where surprised when I said I was only a midlevel dev. They thought I was a senior dev or tech lead based on the things I was saying and doing. I had the same thing happen on the next team I went to where some techleads in the department were surprised that I was only a midlevel. Also I was the ASC for that application and recieved excellent reviews from everyone about that role. That role is supposed to be for people who are a senior dev or higher. Unfortunately there were political issues in that group too.
So after two years of working like this, my supervisor (different one) tells me that I could be promoted but I have to work extra time everyday. Now I'm fine putting in some extra hours to make a date or run an elevation. I'm not just going to work extra hours above company policy as a normal thing. Why would I take a 13% increase in hours for a 7% raise? That's taking a rate cut for a position with more (official) responsibilities.
2. I'm probably not worth anything since I have to learn the new stacks. They have me in AWS tech, which is ok. I got certified, but that doesn't mean much since I dont get a lot of chances to use it. I get some experience in Java and Python ECS and Lambdas. Some Dynamo, Cloudwatch, SNS, SQS, etc. A lot of this is stuff like synthetic alerts or increasing test coverage, which sucks. But then they also throw me on no/low code stuff like Splunk and Tableau, which also sucks. I'm never going to become an expert if the type of work is constantly changing and there are big gaps between when I last used that skill and when I'm asked to do it again.
IMHO, once you have child(ren) , the value of a senior role is questionable, especially since as you point out , more hours are expected which makes it not a real raise (besides "stealing" from quality time with your kid(s) ). Senior roles to me can be a poison chalice, more stress. IMHO when one feels a failure for not being a senior, one might need to emotionally detach, and disconnect self-worth from their job title. To those who say they can't get by on a mid-level salary, well , how does much of the rest of the workforce without tech salaries do it then? One other thought - internal promotions are often a lost cause anyway, (e:g reliant on playing politics). If you're dead set on becoming a senior, job-hopping often the best way. Good luck! :)
That's pretty much how I see it. Except the company's policies do not state any change to the required hours. I feel this is a deceptive employer practice (one of several I've seen).
The bigger issue is that I can't see myself continuing to work here until I'm able to "retire". The work is shit. I've heard many managers will look to fire people or drive them out if they are moving up. I need the job to support my family, so that causes a lot of stress. If I were single, I would have quit years ago... or just stopped trying until they fire me.
Sorry to hear that. Well.. I think workplaces with such mid-year reviews are often not good places to be. Such performance management systems can make individuals completely focused on their own performance grades instead of working together and helping each other. As result , happiness of everyone suffers, and everyone's performance, so it is IMHO not a sensible way to run a business. Some people game the system, some hurt other team members to make themself look better. Feels like a complete waste of time to me and makes for stress. As for being criticised for being too slow, well, maybe what should count is end result not sheer speed. But many businesses don't seem to understand that. Or you may genuinely be slow but that could be stress, its hard when you got young kids, in a better environment you could be more productive. The formula which has worked for me and I share all the time on HN is, learn skills that have strong long-term value e:g linux, command-line, python, ignore fads e:g js libraries, always go for open source if possible, not some vendor that could get bought out or change their strategy. Bottom line is , a happy life should be achievable in tech, we can take not necessarily the best-paying job, not necessarily the most kudos / status, but still have a decent satisfying job that pays enough to raise a family. I have achieved that, partly down to some "vigorous frugality" at times. ;) It's do-able but you have to research employers, talk to people who work different places, find out what its like, sometimes (non-fake) glassdoor reviews can be revealing too. And be prepared to leave jobs and take the plunge. It can be scary to take a risk when you've got kids. But sometimes has to be done. All the best :)
You should be proud of it because the fact that the poor and the rich are working at the same company tells you how successful you are
Or at least that's how I interpreted. I did almost the same things you did. My coworker (many of which are now close friends) went to fancy universities, had no gap in education and from a economically stable family. I wasn't. But here I am, working side by side with folks from amazing school and exceptional employment backgrounds... I love it
I feel like I can relate to many of the things here. It reminds me of the few times I got into enough of a pickle that I needed an advance on my salary. Just a lot of chickens that came home to roost.
At the same time, I recognise my own privilege in that I managed to escape that and get to a place of comfort, and also that there were other things I was fortunate to not experience.
To that extent, I could tell by my reaction sometimes that me-with-success was the one speaking, and not me-with-empathy.
Well played OP for finding a Tweet referenced from the hugely upvoted "The tools and tech I use to run a one-woman hardware company" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225).
Man, I felt this stuff a lot when I was in college. Coming from a lower middle class family in a poor state to a private school in California, there were so many little things to make me feel like an outsider. The part about hobbies was the most memorable because it made my social anxiety worse early on. I always struggled to think of something more interesting than "video games" or "reading". And, of course, the food stuff. Took me years to get into the habit of ordering a salad when out for lunch like a civilized human. But unlike the author's experience I was so much better off than many Americans with backgrounds like mine because I went to a private university that provides enough financial aid to students who need it. So for the most part, I was already better off in college than I was growing up, and I graduated with a manageable amount of debt. But there were times when my family needed a little help and I was scrambling to find some free food to get through to the next paycheck or wondering if Mom would pay me back in time to make the phone bill. I also wasn't the "only poor person" around, and I found others like me which really helped.
I think all the useful political points have been made by others but I think it's also worth saying whatever happens with society overall it can get better for you personally. I hope others who relate to the post find a job that values them enough to start chipping away at the accumulated disadvantage. Once the major financial stress is removed, you can and will acculturate, start worrying less about these little things, and even become more like your peers, and I think it's ultimately a positive thing. These cultural markers are, in part, adaptations to the situations we're in, and if you're working in tech it makes sense that you will find things that newly resonate with you and shed some of the things inherited from parents whose work society decided to value less.
Of course there is at least one serious obstacle to this, which the author astutely points out and which I don't have any good advice on because I still struggle with it:
>I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was afraid to seek mentorship from anyone above me, convinced that even asking would seem like bothersome begging. I watched the people around me network effortlessly, assured of favors and good words put in. I could only think in terms of what I could offer and how I could survive; they were thinking on the next level where they never had to wonder if they were good enough.
People don't change. "poor" in mind will always be "poor" even if surpass Elon Musk. What kind of stories one feed himself/herself on daily basis defines him/her. I am just at ease that everyone is screwed in his/her own way including me. Humans..
Everyone blue collar is going to have about the majority of the same experiences of being out of place in tech or any other big money white collar industry that the author did. You could write the same thing about being the son of a plumber working at an investment bank.
That may be a factor, but getting married later is also just correlated with a higher level of education. It's very rare for someone that goes to college to get married before graduation. But in poorer areas it is not uncommon to see people marry shortly after high school.
>> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because people kept bragging their bodily purity based on what they would not eat or drink, and I could only feel pity for them.
YM without an "about" or similar? Not very common IME, but seeing it now is probably a harbinger of more to come. Feels congruent with "because [something]" (without an "of" in between).
Does living in Oakland really draw arched eyebrows like as stated in the article? Do the neighboring areas like Emeryville, Alameda, or Lafayette do that?
(moving down to SF in a month or two, so just starting to get a feel for east bay ;) )
No, not at all. Oakland draws zero arched eyebrows (in my circles at least, which are made up of everyone from struggling to ultra-wealthy). If anything it's seen as a cooler place to live now that SF is stereotyped as boring techies.
Grew up poor in New Zealand. Parents moved there when I was 2 and struggled with being first generation immigrants.
After years of under-employment, government assistance and scraping by, I lied my way into my first tech job and learned on the job.
I hid the fact that I got one off government assistance for the new clothes I wore on the first day. The gravity of someone buying me a coffee struck me to my core.
It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before to be guaranteed ~$500usd per week, every week. Living with 0 hour contracts, if you said the wrong thing you risked you next week's roster. Work on that level is fraught with petty politics and it really messes with your sense of identity to need to suck up to get by.
Dealing with the government assistance office was demeaning. ~$100usd per week and you had to be in the office twice a week, attending the seminars and talking to your caseworker. With minimum wage at the time being ~$7 an hour, full time employment a dream due to labour laws favouring casual/0 hour contracts, employment was seldom worth it.
It comes to a point of true apathey. I remember thinking "oh my bank account is 2k overdrawn, haha funny".
I started to become politically aware when I got that first job. I, for some reason, thought people were more progressive. I was shocked when I heard my boss and colleagues complaining about taxes going to lazy people taking advantage of the system. I know the people they are talking about, and it's not like that at all but it's so outside my colleagues' bubble of understanding.
As others have stated, it's not "developing nation poor" and I was given more social mobility than my family living in my country of origin - but it's not an easy thing to live through and my mother is still living like that today (though I help now)
I can't appreciate enough the opportunities software engineering has opened for me. I am reminded that I didn't have a cushy upbringing from the little things that separate me from my colleagues.
In some ways I am nostalgic for the times I was cold in my crappy damp house, burning treated offcuts from the local lumber mill giving off toxic fumes. I had so much drive to make it out, I started a new money making scheme every second week. One time I got access to a printer and made a bunch of flyers offering converting VHS tapes to DVDs. Another time I went to retirement villages and helped people set up Skype. I worked for a retail store (like best buy) and started selling my own "home computer installation service" to customers, billed outside of the company - I then started offering other staff cash to sell it too (which got me fired).
I'm not financially poor, but I live like a poor, as a habit. (bike, old clothes, I always buy the old/damaged fruits/vegs and often get them cheap or free
I enjoyed this, it definitely made me think and generated a good conversation. I read it as mostly a list of observations and not something to be defensive about.
I'm sure there's nuance in these scenarios the author describes. But not every blog post has to be an objective evaluation.
This post is accurate in that it chronicles their feelings, and feelings happen regardless of external factors, there's not a whole lot correctness one needs to ask for. I applaud the author for their bluntness in communicating how these interactions made them feel. No need for them to alter their tone to come across differently, it's their blog, not mine. I have to manage an international team of very diverse backgrounds. This post is a great reminder that even those small interactions can contribute to someone belonging. And I've noticed that belonging directly correlates to software velocity.
To me the takeaway is not that any of other people in these scenarios needs to change or correct behavior, but that as a manager if you're aware of an employee coming from a different background, you should make efforts in 1:1's to ensure they're feeling like they belong. Also shame on their hiring manager for letting them come on at such a low salary compared to others. Where's that peron's sense of human solidarity? If someone comes on to my team in a role, they are paid commensurate with others. If I'm worried about their performance they come in at the role that we both agree is suitable, and at all times there's honesty and transparency in what we feel works. Any hiring manager or company trying to "get a deal" on an employee has no business managing.
I'm also poor. I once told a well-off investor that if I counted the hours I spent working on my open source project, my hourly rate over my career would be below that of a McDonald's employee.
His answer was "It's an investment in yourself, you'll make it all back later." - He was partly right, it was an investment, but all it got me was a foot in the door at that company as a regular run-of-the-mill software developer, nothing more.
2 years later, I'm a proven 100x developer, working on some of the most complex projects imaginable as self-employed - I managed to pull myself up by the bootstraps but I still earn much less than all my ex-colleagues who work bureaucratic corporate jobs.
I don't see anything changing for the better. It only seems to be changing for the worst. Nobody even cares about open source anymore. I'll have to be a 1000x developer by the end of the year just to make ends meet as a self-employed developer.
The situation is getting so bad, I find myself fantasizing about communism. Anything to end this crony-capitalist nightmare.
I often think of the quote "In communism, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." - The "pretend to work" aspect sounds like an upgrade over the deal I'm currently getting.
It's interesting how differently her generalizations are received on HN, vs. Paul Graham's, even though her's are (IMO) much more extreme.
I won't be the same as her, though, and say that all poor people complain and that all poor people steal. I'm just gonna say, she's a negative, immoral person.
Why is it always people in tech-adjacent roles that trot this out? This kind of reads like someone falsely attributing class as a barrier when actually it's their cognitive abilities compared to peers.
It always seems like the majority of the writer's woes would be solved if they were themselves more competent at what they do.
Because when you're actually getting a tech sized paycheck it's much easier to justify keeping your head down and continuing to make easy money, you're compensated well enough for what you have to put up with you don't care.
Billionaire CEO of a startup? Are there many? I imagine most billionairses are running established companies. Including the fact the OP says she is in oakland and can commute there faster than the other employees who get in from other places, anyone care to take a guess at who the company is?
Free Advil is something 99% of the people do not need and just take from home what they need. But when you are poor, you take the free offered Advil.
The phrasing was a bit complicated. She realized, she was the only one taking Advil and it was never refilled because only she took from it and she did not empty it.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was the only person who would say hello to the cleaning lady as she meekly made her rounds around us when we worked late. Everyone else had a long habit of ignoring anyone like her.
I hope no one is gullible enough to believe this. This is bond villain stuff and most certainly does not apply to "tech" as a category. I even worked in Finance and never heard of this kind of behavior.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because everyone’s hobby talk was incomprehensible to me. Sailing. Indoor rock climbing. Building robots. Golfing. Sourcing and collecting antiquities. Adult soccer leagues. All I heard was money. Money. Money.
The poorest people in the world play soccer and sports. My parents collected antiques on minimum wage. The biggest antiquers I've known were college students. And as for sailing, most people don't sail on their own boats, they pitch in their physical labor in exchange for getting to participate in the hobby. That's free, you just have to be physically active.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was afraid to seek mentorship from anyone above me, convinced that even asking would seem like bothersome begging. I watched the people around me network effortlessly, assured of favors and good words put in. I could only think in terms of what I could offer and how I could survive; they were thinking on the next level where they never had to wonder if they were good enough. They were to the business-class manner born, at least.
This has nothing to do with poverty. My cousin grew up poorer than I did and is the most arrogant, direct, and demanding person you'll ever meet. If the job pays $100k he'd ask for $500k.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because when I talked about paying off my student loans, people expressed their utter shock that my parents hadn’t put me through Berkeley. Were Mom and Pop simply opposed to public school? Did they disagree with my choice of major?
No one said that. Literally no one is shocked that anyone else has student loans. This is more bond villain hyperbole.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because they thought I was kidding when I said I had a GED.
Well yeah, but this has nothing to do with poverty. You were irresponsible enough to drop out of high school and people are rightfully shocked that you're responsible enough to hold a tech job.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I forgot my charger once and absolutely nobody had one old enough to be compatible with my phone.
Everyone knows this is the opposite. We've all seen poor people in brand new shoes and with the latest iPhone and watch. People in poverty actually have the newest phones. That's part of what keeps them in poverty, irresponsible purchasing habits. Meanwhile most tech people I know have far older devices when it comes to smart phones.
I stopped reading here. This isn't serious. OP is a professional victim who is outright misrepresenting things.
Instead of seeing the bright side of life, in which this person clearly vastly improved their situation in life, all they can see is what they don’t have.
“I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I had the only fat body in the building.”
I’m sorry, but no, being poor doesn’t make you fat. Your eating choices make you fat. Poor people have agency too. Agency is not something you buy. This is coming from someone who probably makes half of what you make in a year.
There are quite a few papers out there on the subject. As someone who has studied a little bit of sociology, I can tell you there are numerous sociological factors which basically determine that wealthier people have access to better food, better medical care and live healthier lives in comparison to lower-socioeconomic people. Where you live alone determines your health equity, if you live in a remote area or small town away from a large city, your access to fresh and non-processed foods is heavily reduced.
It is also worth noting that it's not necessarily how much money you have that is the contributing factor, it can be other factors. The lack of green areas or pathways to walk/exercise (especially prevalent in remote Australian communities), the number of hospitals or doctors close by. But, ultimately, lack of health services and fresh food are correlated to obesity both of which are determined by your location which, in turn, is determined by your financial status.
> if you live in a remote area or small town away from a large city, your access to fresh and non-processed foods is heavily reduced.
Do you really think this? I know the sticks. You apparently don't. You can live off potatoes, eggs, and oatmeal and not be fat. Those are available anywhere.
There is a "poor" culture, there is an "elite" culture, and then there is a "responsibility" culture. I grew up financially poor in a manufactured home in the sticks, but my culture of my parents was that of "responsibility". Know the difference.
"The Road to Wigan Pier" had a great bit about this, which hits the nail on the head based on my experience being working class:
The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the PAC level. White bread-and-marg. and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
>The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots.
The only people who think that have a very privileged upbringing. My SO worked in an archaeological site in central Asia, and the vast majority of the hosts meals were just raw onions and stale flatbread.
Not irrational at all. I've often wondered at some ascetic values of the very rich: cold showers, building a cabin with your own hands, short duration of rough wilderness living, and in your quoted case, abstemious diet. Humanity spent generations trying to escape those conditions, poor people will never willingly engage in them. Is it because the rest of rich people's lives are elevated away from those conditions, so it's a choice to embrace it, and thereby redefining the thing's perceived values?
Yet another data point on why the poor are playing the lottery, eating crisps and not virtuously buying and cooking rice and lentil, there's a game-theory-ish idea that the poor understands that as much hard work and lentil they could shovel, they stand little chance of getting out. So with the money they have they buy the best value thing possible, discounted for future possibilities; and those best value things are junk food, lottery tickets, sometimes expensive (relative to their circumstance) and flashy things like clothes or phones.
"if you live in a remote area or small town away from a large city, your access to fresh and non-processed foods is heavily reduced."
This simply isn't true. Most food deserts are in the poorer areas of the cities because nobody is bringing fresh produce in there to sell. If you live in the country or small town, many of these places have farm stands, farmers markets, and local farmers providing seasonal produce to the local stores.
Not to mention, lower density housing generally means that there is enough land to have a veggie garden, depending on the specific circumstances.
Rural areas being chock full of farmers markets is mostly nostalgia, anyone I know who lives in the country is far more likely to shop exclusively at Walmart than anyone in the city, and likely to prefer more non-perishable food (i.e. processed) because daily or multiple times a week shopping trips are infeasible.
The farms in rural areas are generally focused on growing a single thing (either one type of livestock, or all corn, etc.), entirely for wholesale, farmers markets are a distraction for most of them, outside of smaller farms that are more of a lifestyle / hobby thing a lot of the time.
Farm stands sometimes exist, but they're an exception rather than the rule in most places, and unless you're in an area known for growing fruit or something like that (and primarily selling to tourists driving by) it'll be one-off things like sweet corn in season or eggs.
You're both kind of right here. The farmers market stuff is mostly BS.
In the rural areas the weekly/biweekly shopping routine involves everyone (rich and poor alike) dragging their butts to the one strip mall in a 1-2hr radius and that strip mall will have at the bare minimum a super-walmart with a good fresh produce section or a Walmart with a grocery store beside it because that's the place where rich middle and poor from the entire area shop and it needs to cater to them all in order to get them to drag their butts there and do business. The poor will buy less and fill in the gaps with Dollar General food (which is bad food at a bad price).
The poor urban areas which can't economically support supermarkets and who's residents can't economically justify traveling the range they'd need to travel to get to those supermarkets (because the run down not always running cars that underpin the transportation of the rural poor are not as economically viable in cities) so they're stuck buying food at CVS, the bodega or whatever convenience store is accessible.
If you draw the food desert line at "no Whole Foods and no farmers market" then they both suck. But if you zoom in on the area below that the rural areas have a slight edge.
The idea that farmers markets are commonplace in rural areas is mostly BS. They exist in cities for sure, but you pretty much need an urban population (and probably a fairly well-off population) to really support a farmers market.
Just because farms exist in an area doesn't generally mean the people in that area are getting their food from those farmers (at least directly). That's mostly a relic of an old vision of farms that grew every type of produce and had a variety of livestock instead of the corporate monoculture farms that dominate today.
Sure, the truly rural people aren't going to farmers markets, but the people in small towns and suburban areas do (this is in contrast to the "big city" in the original comment). Most rural people use a store for most stuff and then go to farm stores/stands/neighbors for other things.
There are still farms that produce a variety of produce. Many of them only produce them as a small percentage of their operation. For example, the dairy farm down the road plants sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, cantaloupe, and (not food, but) manure. I know of several other farms that do similar things.
"because daily or multiple times a week shopping trips are infeasible."
Do they not have a refrigerator? Once per week trips (maybe even less) were the norm for me growing up, and I had plenty of fresh fruits and veggies.
I've lived in multiple rural areas. Yes, many people do get food from Walmart. I can see some of the more remote people preferring some processed food. I can also see those remote people growing and processing their own (canning, like I do). Many people use frozen veggies, which I don't consider processed and are nearly as good as fresh. Most of the "fresh" stuff you see is actually months old due to the way the supply chain works. It arguably loses as much or more nutritional value than the frozen stuff. This situation is completely different from the actual food deserts you get in the city. The rural people have the option to buy fresh but may choose not to. These people living in food deserts in the city don't have the option of fresh produce in the stores they go to. They generally don't have space to grow their own either. This lack of choice is the big issue.
Every area I've lived in has had farm stands and farmers markets. It has also had local stores that contract with local farmers for seasonal produce. Individual vendors/farmers do tend to have limited selection by focusing on one or two crops. But there are usually multiple farmers focusing on different things (and coordinating through the local grange). Yes, the majority of farms are monoculture soy or corn. These other farms are usually 90% that but maybe 10% other crops, like pumpkin, corn, watermelon, tomato, cantaloupe, onion, potato, honey, hops, etc. There are also CSAs that you can join for a variety of produce, including meat and dairy. My parents live in an area where the local dairy still has delivery service - that's right a good old fashioned milk man.
> Do they not have a refrigerator? Once per week trips (maybe even less) were the norm for me growing up, and I had plenty of fresh fruits and veggies.
Yeah, I think we're agreeing - I'm saying that going to the grocery store once a week or less is probably going to result in purchasing a smaller percentage of fresh produce (certainly not none, but for meats in particular any less than once a week is starting to get sketchy in terms of keeping things fresh when refridgerated.)
CSAs for sure exist, but I see way more usage of them in urban areas. You're certainly not prevented from using them in rural areas (although delivery might not be available and pickup might be far less convienent than it would be in an urban environment).
This might be a function of where we're from, but in the countryside here hobby side farms by actual farmers are relatively rare and usually aren't producing enough to be considered much more than an in-season treat. I've never heard of milk delivery still being a thing (despite knowing a bunch of people living on farms), so I suspect you just have a different regional experience.
> The farms in rural areas are generally focused on growing a single thing (either one type of livestock, or all corn, etc.), entirely for wholesale,
And most of the farms are not only going to be growing just one thing, but the same one thing as other nearby farms (of which there won't be very many, since farms have been consolidating into ever larger operations for many decades).
I grew up in a rural area and I think I can count on 1 hand how many times I saw a farm stand. People do not shop at farm stands and farmers markets in rural areas that often.
I'm in a very small town right now and it's a reasonable driving distance from farms. It looks to me like the average farm stand is simply some clever person buying crates of produce at the wholesaler.
No shortage of healthy food at the local grocery stores of course.
I expect that people who wave their arms about 'food deserts' could probably stand to visit either small towns or urban areas and form an opinion based on actual experience.
Conjecture here because I don't honestly know, but I think some of what you're observing might just be that food deserts are very regional. If you look at this image [1] you can see that it's basically just the Southeast/Appalachia. Rural Midwest, West, etc don't seem to have this issue nearly as much.
>ost food deserts are in the poorer areas of the cities because nobody is bringing fresh produce in there to sell.
Talking about things that simply aren't true.... Every major city in the US has a large farmer's market present and typically more than one happening in neighborhoods all over the city. These cities also have free/cheap public transportation to get people to the farmer's market. Additionally, you don't need a farmer's market to obtain healthy food, supermarkets are just fine.
The is just trope along the same lines of black people can't get their own ID's or figure out the internet. It's an incredibly racist way of thinking. They're not stupid or incapable people. If they want to they can certainly obtain healthy food.
"The is just trope along the same lines of black people can't get their own ID's or figure out the internet. It's an incredibly racist way of thinking."
I never said black people. That's your own bias talking.
I agree that people can travel to a supermarket (and that supermarkets have healthy food). It's much more difficult to take a weekly trip for a family's needs in public transportation as opposed to loading up a car. More frequent trips tend to incur higher opportunity cost due to the commute times.
IDs are a completely different matter. The need for those trips are about once every 4-6 years and generally lower expense too.
>I never said black people. That's your own bias talking.
I made a comparison to it being similar, I did not say it exclusively affected black people and this is why I used the terms "along the same lines". Reading comprehension please.
>It's much more difficult to take a weekly trip for a family's needs in public transportation as opposed to loading up a car. More frequent trips tend to incur higher opportunity cost due to the commute times.
I disagree. All the elites and hipsters in big cities live this way on purpose so it can't be that hard. I find it ironic that the same people who push for more public affordable transportation will turn around and say it's too hard to use and personal transportation is better when it comes to minorities. Additionally, if we follow your logic then rural people are vastly more affected by this than anyone living in the inner-city since they have to travel much longer distances and don't even have public transportation available.
It's normal and cool actually that we can take something that affects a MAJORITY of Americans and is tightly correlated to poverty and make it a matter of individual responsibility and moral weakness.
It only counts as moral weakness if you're blaming your own obesity on somebody other than yourself. Most people people who are fat are quite happy with eating a bunch of junk food, so they just have different priorities.
If you have have access to $1 frozen veggie bags, $2/lb chicken thighs, and assortment of different legumes, you have it better food options than the majority of the world. You can certainly achieve a healthy diet if you really want to.
It is correlated, not caused by poverty. Rich people are often fat too, and the reason is poor education (not even rich people schools teach this) and poor self-control.
It’s not just food education. If you’re poor in the US you’re much less likely to live near a source of fresh meat and produce, which makes calorie-rich fast food more tempting. You’re more at the mercy of many multi-billion-dollar industries that serve unhealthy food to the masses.
There's an opportunity cost and a time cost (and an attention cost) to making food properly and eating right.
Opportunity: if your area cannot give you produce (raw materials to cook with) that's pretty direct. Time: I'm fortunate enough that I can blow at least an hour a day just cutting up meat for stir-fry or preparing my omelet and oatmeal, and a lot of this is really time-optimized but it's still way more than the microwave-box lifestyle. That hour (at least, and distributed among all my meals for the day) is also an attention sink that I can't skip, even though I make the same stuff over and over. If I couldn't do that, I'd have to not only be getting different foodstuffs, but also figuring out different recipes every time I got bored.
You can let corporate America do that stuff for you and just pick different enticing boxes of microwaveable stuff, but you will get bombed with combinations of sugar and salt because competing in the supermarket aisle is serious business and those who fail are lost. They'd be putting fentanyl in the Hot Pockets if they dared. Anything to make the sale, it's that or perish.
Then, that's what you eat, if you're poor and can't spend hours doing it yourself and doing it right. And if you're poor enough… the selection at Cumberland Farms is going to be strictly kept to whatever the other poor people in your neighborhood are addicted to, because that's what will sell.
I'm from a developing country where these things are affordable and less wealthy people spend money on cigarettes rather than salads. Here it definitely isn't about money but about having proper food culture
I'm not particularly interested in some "studies" that come out with statistics saying its hard not to be obese when poor. The fact of the matter is that it's possible to eat relatively healthy affordably (e.g. rice, potatoes, food on sale/discount), and that if you were truly poor you should be saving money by eating less food.
Or your assumption wrong. Here is a reasonable explanation: People are poor since they got bad self control, which also makes them fat. People who lack self control are easily tempted with shitty fast food, so their areas mostly serves it rather than real food creating these "food deserts".
If there was demand for food in those areas people would sell it, but there isn't.
Edit: A strong piece of evidence is that people aren't getting poorer, but they sure are getting fatter.
If we're talking about the obesity rate, statistics make it clear that it's easy to be obese when poor, not that it's not easy to not be obese for the poor.
Or are you talking about statistics that asked if poor people tried to not be overweight but couldn't do it? If so, could you please send link to that - as I'm not aware of any such large-scale study and quick search didn't reveal anything significant?
If it's not hard to avoid being overweight when poor, and most poor people are overweight... what is happening? Do you see the obvious conclusion here? Do you endorse it?
People are getting fatter and fatter. It is much worse now than 20 years ago, and even much much worse than 40 years ago. Any explanation you can come up with needs to be able to explain this as well. Does poor people have worse access to food today? Do they have less money for food today?
If we put poor people in the same conditions they had 40 years ago they would be slimmer than rich people today.
Over the past 30 years, grocery store prices have risen 4.5 percent above economy-wide prices, indicating that food has become relatively more expensive than some other consumer goods... Real prices for fresh fruits and vegetables grew the most among all major food categories, increasing just over 40 percent... Over the same time period, real prices for fats and oils, sugar and sweets, and nonalcoholic beverages grew less than overall inflation.
Yes I know where you stand on this, I don't need more information about your opinion.
I asked if you see the conclusion of this view, and if you endorse it.
To be very very clear it goes like this: if poor are fat because they make bad choices and for no other reasons, then you can reasonably conclude that that is also why they are poor. That they deserve to be poor for that reason.
As someone who does not live in the US, it is often discussed in my social circles. To us, it appears that this cultural propaganda is a political necessity to stay far from communism. The cultural conception of the extent of the free-will impacts notably justice (individual responsability vs. psy impact of the environment) and wealth redistribution (welfare vs. meritocracy).
The conception that most of the bad things that happen to an individual is because of poor choices makes perpetuating inequalities easier. Notably thoses that stem from free market capitalism.
In France we have a strong cultural awareness of our low/inexsitent free-will. This translates readily into state welfare.
There are food deserts in the USA, where you literally can't buy high quality food like vegetables in a large area, and have to resort to only eating the highly processed and highly unhealthy food. These food deserts usually are located in the poorer neighbourhoods.
Which supermarket chains in the US do not provide vegetables, fruit, meat and only offer processed food? Please find us a 'food desert' where there are no supermarkets nearby.
This is a myth that's easily refuted. There's an argument to be made that poorer people aren't educated on healthy food choices but the idea that they don't have access to anything but processed food is just silly.
Food deserts are a big problem. Most of the urban food deserts developed after major riots burned down existing grocery stores in the late 60s (and then again in the 80s in LA).
New food deserts now exist in Minneapolis (and likely other cities as well) after the recent rioting and burning there:
Ironically, in the most recent riots, many - perhaps most - of the destructive rioters were middle-class "activist" kids who don't have to live with the results of their actions.
But junk food is less filling and satiating than real food and much more dense calorically. You can eat lettuce all day and never consume the number of calories in a fast food burger.
> Being 'underweight' is associated with significant excess death; being 'overweight' is associated with a lower death rate than 'normal' BMI:
This is nonsense. In many medical deaths such as cancer (and especially since euthanasia isn't available) the person dies by slowly withering away. One of the first things that happens is that they become skinny and frail. That doesn't associate underweightedness with mortality. It intentionally draws a false correlation.
However, it doesn't explain why being 'overweight' BMI consistently proves to be protective against death, despite it being so stigmatised that it affects quality of medical care.
> However, it doesn't explain why being 'overweight' BMI consistently proves to be protective against death
I don't see how the "protective of death" conclusion is able to be maintained when it was determined by comparing the mortality of overweight people to frail and dying old people and cancer patients. The reality is that it's the opposite. It's well known that being overweight damages the organs and makes a person more susceptible to dozens of diseases.
I said "relatively slim". I actually meant by that a bit of a tummy, but not morbidly obese. I'm not recommending six packs for all. God knows I don't have one.
Also, being "overweight" could be for a variety of reasons, including excess muscle. I'd be interested to see mortality correlated with % body fat.
Obesity is significantly correlated with lower income. However, in an individual case it is not sufficient to draw conclusions.
Edit: also you seem to present the author's formulation as meaning that they believe poverty caused them to be fat. As far as I can tell she is merely pointing out a series of correlations to both prove that she, in fact, stood out as poor, and to show how this distinction affected her furthermore. Btw I'd say the only actively harmful behaviour from the company she pointed out was making her suggest a salary rather than them making an offering.
Exactly my thoughts. This person just wants to make herself feel good about victimizing herself. Justifying unhealthy behaviour and habits by being poor earlier in her life? Come on. Yes, some of her colleagues seem to be on the other extremes, but many of her examples are just ridicolous. Eg: adult soccer leagues are one of the cheapest activities I can think of, besides running (which is also done by "rich" people).
I'm also coming from a poor family and area, and I also had a few revelations, but nothing like this. My very first of these experiences was at a company paid dinner, where the waiters rolled out a trolley of beverages next to our a table and went away for a couple of minutes. I joked to my colleagues at the table that we could just steal that trolley and nobody would notice it. Nobody laughed, of course and I realised that at that point in my life I could buy a truck of those beverages on my hourly wage. That was nearly 3 months into my career and I just moved on right away.
I must say I was rather triggered by that statement. I'm 100% sure that at one point my earnings were much lower than hers and I wasn't "a fat body". I had a second hand road bike that consisted of many different parts and I loved that thing, I've put thousands of kilometers on that old frame. And guess what, I still use it to this day, even though I could buy a fancy new one.
As a matter of fact, not having a lot of money only emphasizes the fact that your health is one of the things you can influence.
We never had much money, but we ate well. And I ate a lot, but I was also very active. Being active is free.
I know this will upset people, but if poor people are fat, food is not scarce. The quality of food may be low, but low food quality does not make one fat, a surplus of calories does.
To be absolutely clear, I know there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and obesity. It's much more complicated than "just eat less", many factors play into this. Including food IQ. It's much more easy to overeat on Cheetos than it is on potatoes and green beans. A persons social environment will have a big influence on how and what they eat, how much they will move, etc.
Low quality food absolutely can make you fat because it makes it harder to eat properly. Unhealthy food isn’t just “easier to overeat” but also messes with insulin to make you feel more hungry than you actually are.
Because statistically poor people who remain poor have poor impulse control, prioritize short term pleasure and make bad decisions. Like many people who escaped poverty, I am not poor because lacking these traits elevated me out of poverty.
The last 20 years has probably made (much) less difference than you appear to think.
From Wikipedia: "The rate of increase in the incidence of obesity began to slow in the 2000s".
But, to attempt to answer your question:
e.g., the expectation that both adults in a household will work means that people/parents are more likely to be time-poor and not able to cook. Cooking skills have been lost.
> Instead of seeing the bright side of life, in which this person clearly vastly improved their situation in life, all they can see is what they don’t have.
I think there is a self-deprecating humor to the article, and I enjoyed it. Life in tech world is strange sometimes.
Everyone replying is saying various things about how it's not the poors fault that they've been taken advantage of and have crappy food options and that's why they're fat.
They might be right about the bad food options but what these people don't get is that if you're poor you have a lot of bigger more time pressing, more tractable problems to solve than being fat. Most of these people would still be fat if they had more ready access to "good" food because good food wouldn't magically make being fat jump to the top of their priority list.
When you have little money you can very easily justify skipping lunch everyday or something like that. Skipping breakfast or lunch, having a very minimal meal for the one you don't skip (think PB&J, maybe with a fruit cup if you're feeling like a high roller) and then having your big meal at dinner so that your hunger is focused on the parts of the day when you're working and distracted and you go to sleep full is a very, very, tractable form of dieting and cost cutting rolled into one.
But if you have enough money to indulge in food/beer then why not do it, it's about the only luxury you can afford.
This is true in a superficial sense. But healthy food is generally more expensive than junk food. Gym memberships, exercize equipment, personal trainers, and outdoor recreation costs time and money. It's hard to prioritize self-care when you're struggling with the day-to-day stresses of poverty, like how do I get to work after my car broke down for the third time this month. Poverty is stressful and stress-eating is a thing.
Sure, there is no law of physics that makes poor people overweight, but it is much easier to have a thin waistline when you have a fat bank account. And indeed we observe that in the US, poor people are heavier than wealthier people.
The only difference is that if I’m wrong, some people got free stuff but if you’re wrong, people are languishing in despair with little to no lifeline. Are you willing to bet other peoples lives on the idea that your experience is truth? It’s not something I am willing to do; I value human life too much.
Being poor doesn't make you fat per se, but if you look at most stats, higher social levels(whatever that means in each country) usually means less obesity. When I worked in construction, most people were eating an absolute crap and were often overweight. Then I joined a professional services company and I literally walked into an office of 50 or so people, where everybody was slim and most people ate pretty healthy, home made food.
There are lots of factors why that's the case,but to say it's not happening like this wouldn't be right either.
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like
oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter
to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it
would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do
such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on
brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less
money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A
millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an
unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of
the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say
when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to
eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth
of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and
we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are
at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you
to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than
brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery
that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the
English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a
temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
Yes, but before that excerpt Orwell pointed out that the financial margins involved in eating healthily on the minimum income were much narrower than the "why don't they just" contingent knew or admitted. That doesn't carry over to the contemporary US as self-evidently as the psychological point does, but I suspect that it does carry over somewhat.
I do encourage anyone who hasn't already to read the whole chapter http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/5.html : it's not really very long though I felt that the relevant parts were a bit too long, all together, to fit in a comment.
I'm glad I didn't read that book when I was still "poor", it's so relatable and hits hard. I recommend it for anyone kind of wondering (he's not exactly kind to the working class, but he does try hard to understand it all and does have insight).
Are you suggesting that she chose to be employed at a start up and is actively choosing to stay there because it's a worse situation than she had before?
> Instead of seeing the bright side of life, in which this person clearly vastly improved their situation in life, all they can see is what they don’t have.
First, I dont think this accurately describes the list at all. Second, it is ok for people to express negative feelings or observations. Forced positivity is toxic.
This is every bit as cringe as PG's Fierce Nerds post. I think it's great both of them are working through some of the insecurities from their youth, but attempting to extrapolate their personal issues into some overarching social model is solipsistic naval gazing at its finest.
I think one wrinkle in this narrative is that this is about a crypto company, where there was a lot of new money sloshing around too. You won't experience things like this at HP, Adobe, Amazon, or Veritas to name a few companies in the Bay. I've worked at several companies but I've never met someone who went to Greece on a 3 day weekend.
> Elison is a high school dropout, a graduate of UC Berkeley
> Meg Elison is a California Bay Area author and essayist
So basically she went to one of the better universities in the country, but choose to follow her dream and become an author rather than an engineer. That is a rich person choice, a poor person would choose the career with high pay. She can only blame herself here.
I doubt she was an author at a tech startup (though its possible of course). The more charitable reading is that she works in tech and publishes on the side (like I do any many many other tech workers).
Involuntary poors are a huge threat to our society. They lack morals, discipline and intelligence because if they didn't they would have pulled themselves up their own bootstraps already. They are never more than one step from petty crime, and never more than two from snapping and going berserk on the people around them.
When some inpoo walk by me with their smelly ragged clothes or poo on some SF street (seriously, it's so common it's basically a trope???) I instinctively watch my back and clutch my pearl necklace firmly because I know they are just waiting for an opportunity to steal it (I managed to get a good deal, when it was on sale for at $18999 at Tiffany's, and it looks so sparkly and amazing. I always get a lot of compliments for it!).
But anyway the point I'm trying to make is that the inpoos are a menace and a threat to our dear city, and they should be driven out by ensuring high quality environmentally friendly housing that they can't afford, by taking down their tents and upgrading benches to those new ones you can't sleep on. And the police need to keep them under constant surveillance. It's not enough but it's a start at least.
The sad part is I am actually having trouble distinguishing if this is a joke or not.
EDIT: yeah it probably is, the “bootstraps” quip, pearl clutching joke (followings by the price point bragging), the poke at the benches and mostly the joke about building unaffordable housing give it away, but there’s enough in their not to far away from serious suggestions I’ve read.
As someone who has sat at some interesting class and race intersections during my career in tech, including my time at some very prestigious institutions like the University of Cambridge and FAANG, and has exhibited and noticed many of the listed behaviours and the lack there of, I can say this article had the undeniable ring of truth and made me feel sick to my stomach. Guilty for when I’ve been on the rich side and angry for the times I’ve been on the poor side.
The psychology of growing up with financial uncertainty - and a risk of racial exclusion - is hard to shake and can be passed from parent to child. My life has mostly been financially blessed but you can’t buy your way out of the mindset, or snap your fingers / empty the cache / cycle the power the way the average HN commenter seems to think you can.