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Poor in Tech

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Re: Poor in Tech

#471

Post by proxyon »

teachingassist wrote: post #467
proxyon wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mortalit…

This criticism is apparently quite reasonable. You can also observe that being underweight is correlated with smoking. [Edited to add: this article explicitly considers the link to cancer, and rejects it, https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1... ] However, it doesn't explain why being 'overweight' BMI consistently proves to be protective against death, despite it being so stigmatised that it af…

> 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.

Re: Poor in Tech

#472

Post by [deleted] »

magicalhippo wrote: post #28
est31 wrote: post #10

> 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…

I'm definitely not poor, and I've always greeted the cleaning staff. That's not a sign of being poor, it's a sign of not being an ass.

[deleted]

Re: Poor in Tech

#473

Post by kingsuper20 »

"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. Seaweed snacks were always empty. Nobody had those telltale red stains on their fingers but me."

https://i2.wp.com/writingtheother.com/wp-content/uploads/202...

Re: Poor in Tech

#474

Post by HelloNurse »

Grustaf wrote: post #214
contriban wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not all rich people want to go to cookie cutter resorts, seems more like an upper middle class thing. Maybe it's different in the US.

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).

Re: Poor in Tech

#475

Post by throwaway0a5e »

avancemos wrote: post #7

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 comin…

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.

Re: Poor in Tech

#476

Post by fmajid »

teachingassist wrote: post #22
avancemos wrote: post #7

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 comin…

Food insecurity is an aspect of poverty and is not uncommon in the United States. "Your eating choices" as a poor person might be to eat what and when and where you can afford to.

Eating choices are not really choices (or Hobson's choices) when you have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet and have no time left for food prep.

Re: Poor in Tech

#477

Post by jmt_ »

xyzelement wrote: post #266
jmt_ wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decade…

> 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 de…

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.

Re: Poor in Tech

#478

Post by ryandrake »

isomorph wrote: post #116

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 /…

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.

Re: Poor in Tech

#479

Post by lovegoblin »

kingsuper20 wrote: post #473

"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. Seaweed snacks were always empty. Nobody had those telltale red stains on their fingers but me." https://i2.wp.com/writingtheother.com/wp-content/uploads/202...

You should be a better person than you are being here.

Re: Poor in Tech

#480

Post by jmt_ »

zozbot234 wrote: post #434
jmt_ wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decade…

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, b…

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.
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