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Comment by DickingAround | Hacker News Reader

It's hilariously wrong. Tech is scooping people up from all over the world. And it's having to pay super high salaries because the supply is so limited. I guess maybe startup funding only goes to a few, but there's a lot of programmers from every walk of life who do a lot of work and are all getting good money. The idea that drivers are going to be left aside by automation is 100% true. The idea that they had no chance to get into tech is 100% false; learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech. Now some tech people foresee the world with good automation and want to try to help others, and suddenly they're being condescending for not recognize their privileged? This word drawn in the article don't match up with facts. It is based on so many falsehoods it's factually incorrect.

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> And it's having to pay super high salaries because the supply is so limited.

No, it is having to pay super high salaries because it insists on forcing people to all move to the same place, which both artificially limits the talent pool and drives the cost of living there higher.

> The idea that they had no chance to get into tech is 100% false; learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech.

The result is that self-taught people have an ever-harder hill to climb to even get interviews, let alone get hired. How many times have we had discussions here wherein people said their job postings were inundated with unqualified and barely-qualified boot camp grads?

Well, as someone working in tech and making good money outside the valley I think the SF-cost-of-living-problem is a bit of a misnomer for the wider tech community. People all over the world are getting big rich off of tech.

And I think the inundation of underqualified is just the cost of sorting out the good people. I've personally hired two people who never went to college. And I know a lot of people with unrelated and/or BS-only degrees who went big. You can get a laptop that does fine for $300 + internetCost. Getting an education that could earn 6-figures if you're good at it has never been easier. Maybe not perfect, but never easier.

> Well, as someone working in tech and making good money outside the valley I think the SF-cost-of-living-problem is a bit of a misnomer for the wider tech community. People all over the world are getting big rich off of tech.

Yes, but they are the exception.

> And I think the inundation of underqualified is just the cost of sorting out the good people.

Which this industry has consistently shown it is horrible at.

> I've personally hired two people who never went to college.

That doesn't say anything about how the larger industry behaves.

> And I know a lot of people with unrelated and/or BS-only degrees who went big.

A degree is still enough of a signal to get you past screens that one with no degree can't.

> You can get a laptop that does fine for $300 + internetCost. Getting an education that could earn 6-figures if you're good at it has never been easier.

"Could" being the opportune word. In most of the country the median salary for a software engineer with a degree and 10 years experience isn't six figures. If you are trying to sell people the idea that they are going to make $100,000/year after a few months of Coursera courses on a $300 laptop you are selling a pipe dream.

I don't substantially disagree with you. I think we're making different points. What I'm trying to make the case for is that it is a meritocracy. Not that everyone has what it takes to deliver. The article claims that it's not actually a meritocracy; that the people who get ahead don't have unusual skills. I think they do, or at least more so than at any point in the past or other industries. Maybe they got them from upbringing or DNA or their parent's ability to have time off to teach them personally or whatever. But when most programmers make a lot of money it's because they were good at it.

Fair to think it is wrong. But "hilariously"? When there are hundreds of thousands of jobs/livelihood that will disappear, with the sense of purpose they bring to people, i don't find it funny.

I now think the article has a point about arrogance.

This comment kinda reads like that guy from South Park who always complains that "they took our jarbs!"

For most individuals, low-paid and low-skilled jobs don't give nearly the sense of purpose that a tech job gives. People are driving cars and sweeping corridors because they need to survive, not because they love doing it.

The difference between welfare and honest income resulting from such a job is ~$5/hr in many industrious cities in the US. I think many people would - understandably - rather just sit on their asses all day and collect that welfare instead of working a back-breaking manual labor job. That's why there is a record number of "discouraged workers" [1] in the US's labor reports. Low-income jobs are becoming less useful for the overall economy and this trend started over 100 years ago. This is why the government established that ever-convenient "safety net" (which, yes, has many holes in it) in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discouraged_worker#/media/File...

The article is not about whether programmers are doing well for themselves. It's about what happens to the rest of society when only one section (tech\finance) do well for themselves at the expense of everyone else?

So, what about people who are not capable of doing more than semi-skilled labor? Let them starve?

>learning materials have never been cheaper and self-taught people are the kings of tech

I've had English & PoliSci coworkers who couldn't find rewarding work in their degrees; so they self-taught tech and landed well-paying jobs in short order. Smart cats. I remember one venting about an English-degree colleague berating him for his privilege. Same degree; A made a choice, and B blames privilege. It's a general sentiment I see towards coders, like we were born with a laptop and capital.

Was this in the last year or so? My sense is that only recently has the boom in bootcamps massively upped the level of self-taught/entry-level competition.

> I remember one venting about an English-degree colleague berating him for his privilege. Same degree; A made a choice, and B blames privilege.

Privilege is still involved, though. You need to have a lot of spare time in order to self-teach programming - that's very easy for people with comfortable incomes and/or the support of people with one. If you're drowning in student debt and taking on multiple part time jobs in order to make ends meet, self-teaching is never going to be able to get high enough on the priority list.

Everyone has spare time. I was working as pizza delivery driver while self learning PHP web programming. I had to give up having a social life for about year, but there was plenty of time.

> Everyone has spare time

They really don't. Were you paying rent while working as a pizza delivery driver? Did you have any dependents to support? Any health conditions that you struggled to afford to treat without health insurance?

Some of these are intractable problems (if you have kids, life is busier) but the broad attitude of "opportunity is waiting for you if you choose to take it" is nonsense. It's entirely possible to be trapped in your current life situation. It wouldn't matter so much except that it is an absolutely tiny leap from that characterizing these people are lazy and not deserving of any help or pity.

Of course I was paying rent, what a ridiculous assertion.

You can all construct all kinds of fictional scenarios where someone can be literally occupied for all 168 hours of every week, but we both know that the overwhelming vast majority of people have 20 hours a week of time. I have two small kids now and work full time and still have 20 hours over the course of the course to week to do things. "Life is busier" just means there are other things you choose to prioritize higher.

> Of course I was paying rent, what a ridiculous assertion.

A lot of people learn to code while living with the parents, I don't see what is ridiculous about me mentioning it.

> You can all construct all kinds of fictional scenarios

Look, these scenarios exist. It isn't the scenario you experienced, and I'm not saying it's some widespread epidemic that is taking over the country. But they absolutely exist. It's why things like scholarships exist for universities - to help give people opportunities they would not be able to reach otherwise. There are no scholarships for self-taught programming, so it is not a realistic option for everyone.

See I rarely ever see anybody in HN make this observation which is very much true. You can easily tell that the average HN reader is unaware of the "spare time" privilege they may possess and how others are hamstrung by their circumstances.

Privilege: Yes. But it's still merit-based-pay when someone can do some work and someone can't do that work. Maybe that first person had everything going for them. Maybe they were groomed at the DNA level for this job. But they can get it done. And the second person can't. So it's still merit-based.

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