701–710 of 753 posts
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I have the cushy upper middle class programming job and I'm still tired every day. I must be doing something wrong.
Do you snore, snort, or startle awake at night? Consider if a sleep quality/apnea test might help you. (ugh, this sounds like a commercial...)
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This is neither a troll nor survivor’s bias. My brother also makes great money. What does it have to do with lottery? I’m suggesting that hard work and diligence makes you successful. Sure, I’m moderately intelligent (or I might not have been able to learn web dev, etc.), but if others are not intelligent enough to pull themselves up in the world, it’s not my job to pay them more for not being intelligent. People tha…
>Anybody who’s got $1000 phone (read: just about everyone) The ignorance of this alone makes the whole comment worthless.
$1,000 is much more than some sub-Saharan Africans and some Asians can afford to eat in 1 year.
If you have enough money for a phone that costs as much as another man’s year’s worth of food, your woes are irrelevant.
It sucks when people who don’t have the things they want, and live in areas they don’t want to live. But in the grand scheme of things, these are all conditions that we control. Unless you are incapable of providing for yourself (truly handicapped), and then the only reason you don’t have, to a certain degree, what you want, is that you don’t want it bad enough. If you have even a moment of downtime (TV, gaming, relaxing), then you live in luxury compared to those who relentlessly pursue their dreams.
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I agree wholeheartedly with this. Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll un…
I think this is a phenomenal idea. The last project I worked on was designed to look good in a demo or on mocks but not really to be usable. I was constantly asking our designers and PMs to try using our product as a user might. I'd write up little scenarios that I knew our users struggled with and invite people to try them out with our product. Sadly, I found it impossible to persuade anybody to design for anything…
But I'll be able to understand their job better and what the software really needs to do to make than more efficient and productive. They'll appreciate that and be more likely to buy in and adapt to the product they'll be using.
That's not your job. Your job is to implement the features you're told to implement.
But the users saw those features and said that is not what they asked for.
So? Why do you care if the project fails? It's not on you if it fails. Just do what the BA's said to do.
Boss, they aren't translating the business needs correctly. We have to rebuild features 2 or 3 or 4 times. Is we could see what they do and talk to them it'd only take once. That's happened a couple times during user acceptance. They said that's not what what we asked for. I said what did you ask for? I coded it right there on the spot and they signed off on the user story.
Go back to work. I'm busy. This isn't a productive conversation.
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So now people who are trying to make a living with a small business don’t deserve to be in business but tech bro’s who can convince people to invest billions in companies that will probably never be profitable should stay in business? Especially since we know that most venture funding goes to people who “pattern match” with Zuckerburg not the people who are running small businesses. Yeah that’s going to make the poor…
This is whataboutism. Believing that businesses who can’t afford to pay their staff a living wage shouldn’t exist doesn’t entail any position on the issue of unprofitable tech companies.
The mom and pop shop can’t get millions of dollars thrown at them because they “pattern match” what a successful founder “looks like” without a business plan. They actually have to be profitable.
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> Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Imho that's trying to solve a symptom, not the actual problem. Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$? Instead, it somehow has become completely normalized that these kinds of jobs exist, and anybody who doesn't want to work them is considered "too entitled", which all goes back to this not…
> Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$? We do strive, which is why we have non-shit jobs now. After the advent of agriculture, overwhelming majority of people has worked mundane, tiring, repetitive and straining jobs. It’s only recent increases in technology allowed us to produce immense amounts of wealth, finally allowing huge swaths of population to enjoy ligh…
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Americans are generally reluctant to allow rich social benefits that aren't "earned". People who don't earn are called "lazy". In reality they're unable. They're unable because they lack access to good education starting very early in life. They lack access because their parents also lacked access, and nobody with access is willing to give these "lazy" people a "handout". This sharp (and sharpening) class divide is t…
Stockholm syndrome meets conditions tantamount to slavery. Americans don't know how bad they have it. And what's worse, the pervasive American fallacy of "suffering equals merit equals reward." Too many suffering slaves accuse the slaves in the house of being lazy, and vice-versa. A divided-and-conquered people who will also buy into partisan right/left nonsense rather than see their true, common enemy who has system…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714138
and
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America, a nation of temporarily embarrased millionaires. If you are currently poor, you just aren't working hard enough / smart enough and need to pull yourself up by your boot straps! Anyone can get ahead, get the American dream! If you're poor, well, you must be lazy or stupid. “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the…
Yes. The bootstraps metaphor was originally intended to indicate a completely impossible feat, like going from homeless to successful unaided.[0] It's impossible. For example, I've been vehicle dwelling and very poor in Silicon Valley for about 10 years as I've been unable to hold a job (ADD/Aspergers/speech impediment). I get called names and dirty looks all the time. I'd like to make some money, but only in a worke…
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But should it really have been that hard for you? Massive creds for managing to pull yourself out, but it seems unfair and petty to wish upon others the same hardship you've had.
soulofmischief wished no kind of hardship, he is preaching an idea of taking responsibility for improving your life. I personally have not read any moral judgment in his comments; just a simple fact that, in many cases, if you want to improve your life you need to do it yourself. This together with a conjecture that in most cases the average person has indeed the possibility of upward mobility. A conjecture that was…
I can say that one thing which did help me was that even though I grew up impoverished, I still had a few middle-class friends whose relative wealth "rubbed off on me", if you will. And I had a handful of teachers whose participation extended past the obligations of their jobs and who were ready to write letters of recommendations at a moment's notice to any institution and give me space to learn in my own way.
But these bonds were formed with the express intention of networking and while I am thankful for the help I've received from these people, I also recognize that I would have not received this help if I were generally a dick to people around me and didn't seek out friendships with useful people.
If we can discuss these kinds of things and reach a general consensus on what the obstacles are and how to overcome them, this information could be critical to others in their struggle. What information is Ms. Brown missing?
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soulofmischief wished no kind of hardship, he is preaching an idea of taking responsibility for improving your life. I personally have not read any moral judgment in his comments; just a simple fact that, in many cases, if you want to improve your life you need to do it yourself. This together with a conjecture that in most cases the average person has indeed the possibility of upward mobility. A conjecture that was…
No moral judgement? He's literally stating that he thinks people who can't get out of poverty within 10-20 years are not worth his empathy. It's clear as day that he considers her to a large degree responsible for her situation. The anectotal example he is asking for is in the very article we're discussing. Not that she has made no mistakes, but that (as has been stated several times in these comments) such mistakes…
The truth is that you're being way overcritical. Nothing about my post is clear as day, the only comments I made regarding Ms. Brown were in the form of questions. Are you going to help answer those questions or just light me up with your virtue signalling?
I’ve worked in the fast food industry for 14 years—about half my life Can someone give me an anecdotal example of how this could come to be without some fault in Brown's decision-making process? For starters, I've always heard that commute time is inversely proportional to career mobility. I made it a rule not to work anywhere farther than half an hour away. And that is the absolute maximum which was necessary when I…
Genuinely curious: given that you grew up in abject poverty, how did you end up with a great education? That to me is the crux of this whole issue at hand. Kids who grow up in real abject poverty have negligent parents, go to bad schools early on, get pulled out of school, etc., setting them up for failure beyond their reasonable ability as adults.
I didn't go to preschool, but I did go to a local Head Start after qualifying.
I went to 5 kindergartens because I kept getting handed around relatives, and at one point I was even kidnapped by a relative before again being rescued and changed schools. After finally staying in one place for more than a few weeks, teachers saw that I had arithmetic down and put me in a mathathon. I came in second because I was a brat and didn't want to use counting blocks, preferring to rely on mental math. This planted the seed for the person who beat me to become a childhood rival, which helped immensely in my extra-curricular pursuit of education. We were always neck to neck in scores for everything. We each read 2-3 books a week to compete in Accelerated Reader scores. I think having a rival really made a difference in my motivation.
One issue with children is they often lack motivation of any kind, and if you look towards their parents you will see the same thing. The motivation to best my rival was really an internal motivation to prove to myself that I could be great at anything I put my mind to. I don't know where this internal motivation comes from. Is it something that can be consistently instilled in others?
I went to a similarly large number of middle and high schools, bouncing around a lot between family members, my atheism being a point of contention among my relatives. I actually attended both the worst-ranked high school in my state which is often ranked worst in education in the country, so basically one of the worst high schools in the country, and I also attended one of the top dozen elite high schools of the country.
The disparity is indescribable. On the bad end, half of my classes were a revolving door of substitute teachers with no curriculum given to them, the other half were just the teacher yelling over students who were yelling over each other, throwing things, smoking cigarettes, and playing music on their phones in the middle of class. Regular police raids and schoolwide body searches. Massive school board corruption. And I do have sympathy. I want them all to succeed and be happy. The heat map for high test scores very often conspicuously radiated from my position in the classroom.
In the end, it really came down to the desire to learn. I was not allowed to use the computer for anything not school related for most of my childhood (it's the devil's silicon), and so I learned how to hack computers, sideload applications, circumvent firewalls, gain root access, etc. so that I could sneak out in the middle of the night and learn about things that interested me like 3D modeling, graphic design, music, programming, and general web geek culture. After school, my idea of a fun time was hanging out at the library. I even had dates there. My entry into an elite boarding school was entirely merit-based and paid for by the state. The school is open up to anyone in the country however and there are other schools just like it.