Bad waitress: Dying on your feet • Hacker News Board

Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet

#151

Post by PlunderBunny » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

Freedom2 wrote: post #48

JohnFen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." Yeah, I don't buy that either. I know that the best software engineering work I've done in my entire life happened when I was working as a hotel housekeeper, before I was programming professionally. It was because cleaning hotel rooms is a purely physical, and highly repetitive job. Every day at work,…

Brandon Sanderson has a decent quote from Secret Project #1, that makes me think a bit. > That is one of the great mistakes people make: assuming that someone who does menial work does not like thinking. Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind. If you wish to become…

“An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body.” ― George S. Patton Jr.

Other developers keep trying to persuade me to use multiple monitors (I have a laptop - I can't be bothered plugging it in every day, and I'm used to switching between windows with the keyboard). I struggle to explain to them that, even if I was less 'efficient', that time I 'lose' is not wasted - It's thinking time.

Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet

#152

Post by cafard » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #23

refulgentis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that an example of you: A) being a waitress learning to be a writer? B) an intellectual learning to be a waiter? I would have thought A, but you imply it's B. That's interesting to me, because when I was a waiter, I certainly didn't feel B. My high school classmate who went to Cornell and I spent an hour or two a day with senior year pretended they didn't remember me. Customers constantly talked down to me. I buil…

I meant it as "A", but on second thought, you're right, it's more like "B". I suppose that my real, underlying point is that you can't reliably tell what a person's skillset is by what they do for a living.

I'd have said, Neither. Having worked briefly on cleaning crews, I believe that the work comes in larger and more predictable blocks than waiting tables does, and leaves one more time for thinking one's own thoughts.

No, you can't tell about a person's skillset. I teach ESL, and have taught

  a. An employee of the the Brazilian national health department now cleaning houses in Montgomery County, Maryland.
  b. A Nicaraguan attorney now cleaning rooms for a Washington, DC, hotel.
  c. A Salvadoran archivist doing construction work here.

And forty years ago, I caught a cab driven by a man from west Africa with a degree in urban planning, who had found it better for his health to leave his native country, where he was not well regarded by the government.

And there are plenty of native-born Americans who are holding down jobs that are not commensurate with their skills or anyway potentials.

Re: Bad waitress: Dying on your feet

#153

Post by garfieldandthe » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 6:33 AM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #98

omginternets wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Ph.D I've met has been a very hard worker, on par with the people I worked with in the military.

Weirdly I have personally never considered PhD to be indicator of being particularly smart. Probably above median, but not special. On other hand it sure requires lot of work to be done. Or at least time spend.

"Hard working" and "smart" are very different things.

One could almost say that not being smart requires you to be harder working. (At least that's what I'm telling myself to keep working hard.)