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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

You write as though you've never held a minimum wage job. Have some compassion for those people who are working hard for almost nothing. Sometimes, it isn't their first choice, or it's their only choice. I would suggest a better experience is had when you give respect to the (say) service industry worker you engage in a transaction with.

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I disagree. It's not that the GP isn't being compassionate or understanding their perspective. They're describing why automation is more appealing to a large company and why this change is taking place. That said, the change will likely be met with the same response that similar changes have come with: people won't be out of jobs, the job market will change. Programming jobs will become more common, for example. Minimum wage jobs will turn into more conventional jobs/push more people into the software industry. It's sad that they're losing their jobs now, but the hope is that this will elevate them in society and give them new opportunities (which in the past has proven to be the case, luckily).

> It's not that the GP isn't being compassionate or understanding their perspective. They're describing why automation is more appealing to a large company

Could be both

Even economists themselves finally admit that retraining is the missing link in the global trade model. So while jobs go, people don't transfer into other well paying jobs. Instead the good jobs are replaced by worse paying service sector jobs.

So that theory that people will get new opportunities which are as good, or they can transition into is not valid.

Now if the service sector jobs go too?

Maybe we should be working on better ways to get the poor educated and integrated with modern society as opposed to making them dependent on jobs which take all of their time, don't pay nearly enough, and block any and all opportunity for a way out because there's no free time or disposable income.

We should also work on better ways to equip society to have skills that are more "valuable" in the modern high-tech world, absolutely.

The incompassioante charge made by the gp is still fair, I think: Saying these workers provide "no value" is too business-focused and incompassioante. Yes, these workers provide little value in terms of profit to the business, but looking at societal value at a larger scales, these jobs do have value (to the workers, to their families, to the local businesses and landlords they can now make business with using their wages, to homelessness, crime, hunger, etc.). Simply replacing these workers with technology is a net negative for society if we don't do what you suggested.

The free market thinking that the poor deserve to be fired because their skills are no longer competitive, can be, I think, a privileged and incompassioante position.

It's not that they don't provide any value, it's that their value isn't competitive anymore.

We could be talking about automation or outsourcing, and it would be the same - labor (especially unskilled) is generally getting cheaper. For outsourcing, there is different labor than us that is benefiting, and that's good. That allows them to prosper and buy food and have a life. We also have robots, which are basically virtual slaves that only benefit their owners.

Overall, you could say that there would be an overabundance of labor then. And we hit this before, with the industrial revolution, and new waves of technology in general. What about all the human telephone operators? Or the candle makers? Maybe it really is different this time. Maybe it's not. Nobody really knows for sure.

It sounds uncompassionate, but these are the same forces that drive down prices so everyone can shop happy at walmart (which I do too). Providing cheaper living is great for everyone as well, and nobody remembers that when talking about fewer people working.

> workers provide "no value" is too business-focused and incompassioante

By creating the minimum wage floor the government enforces the notion of value creation. With hypothetical example of minimum wage set at $10 an hour everyone producing $10.01 worth of value within a 60-minute period gets to stay, everyone producing $9.99 and below gets to leave.

Compare that to Asian societies where some companies have an [usually older] tea and coffee lady in the break room. The pay is usually next to non-existent - the lady is usually retired and has a variety of savings and a safety net. She doesn't do it for a paycheck, but she craves human contact, so helping out with tea and coffee while chatting to younger employees is fulfilling her social (but never financial) needs at that age.

Such a position is impossible in US corporate environment within the current framework of labor laws, so we deny older people gigs with simple communication opportunities. Not necessarily because US companies are generally more evil and stingy.

"Compare that to Asian societies where some companies have an [usually older] tea and coffee lady in the break room. The pay is usually next to non-existent - the lady is usually retired and has a variety of savings and a safety net. She doesn't do it for a paycheck, but she craves human contact, so helping out with tea and coffee while chatting to younger employees is fulfilling her social (but never financial) needs at that age."

When I used to live in Singapore I saw a lot of miserable looking hunchbacked old ladies and men cleaning food courts and they were for sure doing it for financial reasons:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-06/what-reti...

The worst part is the excuse - the country is staggeringly wealthy, vastly unequal and yet excuses itself with "we can't afford these pensions any more" because "we have fewer children and higher life expectancy", presuming that GDP growth has obviously been zero for the last 40 years and we just haven't noticed that the money actually is there.

You seem to be assuming that low-wage workers are all poor and uneducated. That is misleading. From [1]:

  50% of minimum wage workers are under the age of 24
  25% of minimum wage workers are under the age of 19

Entry level jobs paying minimum wage teach important skills to teens and young adults:

  * being on time
  * attention to detail
  * how to work with others
  * how to follow instructions ...

There is certainly room for discussion about how to help heads-of-household who are struggling with a minimum wage job because they don't have any other skills, but it is a mistake to assume that is the situation for all minimum wage workers.

High minimum wages price many entry level workers right out of the market making it difficult for them to gain these entry level skills which are important for subsequent jobs.

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-mi...

There are two distinct problems at play:

1. Workers whose contributions are undervalued.

2. Workers who cannot be trained or educated to provide high-value labour.

These are both issues.

(There are other categories: parents, caregivers, the disabled, sick, or handicapped, etc. But the two classifications above represent a major part of systemic failure of labour markets.)

3. Creating a hellish nightmare society where I am not afforded the opportunity to talk to a single random person in the going about of my average day.

If you think the class gaps and problems of lack of cross-socioeconomic empathy are an issue now, wait until a middle class worker can go 24 hours without ever having to interact with anyone making less than them.

"Raise taxes to fund foodstamps? Crazy! I hear the poor are doing just fine eating their insect protein cubes. I saw a report about it on the TV last night!"

I'm middle class and I can go 24 hours or even many days without interacting with anyone. The future is already here. Can't say I'm all that impressed with it.

That's drifting significantly from the matter at consideration here.

I've quit my remote job for in-office for this very reason. The hell of constant noise and having to warm up seat for 8 hours (even when I can realistically concentrate on code for maybe 4-6) is better than the hell of sitting at home alone coding for months. I think... (I'm starting the in-office job in a couple weeks).

The in-office hell is worse.

Hell is other people.

The problem is, in remote job there are still other people, but they are in remote time zones and your bandwidth to them is frustratingly limited (most communications occur via chat, sometimes a hangout). It does not make the communication less important though - for example, some code nazi on your team will post lots of remarks to your patches in code review and now, instead of going to him and explaining your perspective, you need to painstakingly type it into boxes on Github... My experience was that the review process with such people (when done remotely) takes at least as many calendar days as the work itself. Granted, it's not all useless pedantism - they often want me to rewrite the code so that it's more similar to the rest of the codebase (we were doing Scala+Play, where you often have many ways to approach a problem) - but it would be so much less painful to go over it in person.

I don't know what entry level jobs you worked at. Every single entry level job I worked at just taught you how to sign off paper work saying you did procedure A when you hadn't done it months, how palling around with the managers got you whatever shift you wanted, and how to turn a 2 minute trip into the back room into a 30 minutes break. There were some lessons in petty theft as well if you were interested in that. You had to go at least 3 levels of management up to actually find someone who cared about the results of the work, and who wasn't just pulling a paycheck.

I'm going to add more to this cause the idea of entry level jobs teaching skills you need to work at other jobs isn't sitting right with me.

As a rule, the only skill entry level jobs teach anymore that apply to future jobs is how to eat shit and keep going. Every single habit you would learn would need to be unlearned to be valuable in skilled labor. You need to be independent and able to think of novel solutions to provide value at higher skilled jobs. Entry level jobs will grind you up and fire you under some made up offense so you can't even get unemployment. You succeed by being as close to a robot as possible.

> As a rule, the only skill entry level jobs teach anymore that apply to future jobs is how to eat shit and keep going

Eh, I've had this experience at well-salaried jobs too. It's a job thing, not a minimum wage thing.

"Maybe we should be working on better ways to get the poor educated and integrated with modern society"

So you want an order of magnitude more competition for your own job?

Maybe we should be doing what we did in the 1930s when there was a similar 'surplus of labor' - creating jobs which create valuable public works like LaGuardia or the Lincoln Tunnel instead of pretending that if aggregate demand is weak, it's because everybody already has everything that they need.

Agreed. And doing that will put a lot of money into demand, which translates into more and better business opportunities.

I visit the great places created by CCC, WPA type efforts and value them, even in their often current state of disrepair.

More please. Worth it.

Many people I know in low-wage jobs have either trade-skill jobs on the side or degrees in things like business (eg finance). The latter say they're under or overqualified for higher-paying position. I got the same overqualified stuff from all kinds of businesses out here, too. The businesses are systematically blocking talent.

Blocking talent? Or not in need of the talent offered at the price expected?

They say they need it. They often do need it to achieve their goals. Then they block everyone that can do it unless they'll do it for a ridiculously low amount. One so low that it seems to result in half-assed results in most IT work that cause them trouble down the line. They just can't afford that $10-20k for real production work.

That said, they can pay someone $1+ mil a year to let the people under him do all the work. Give executives raises. Pay for meetings in expensive hotels that could happen over the phone. Buy lavish furnishings for their buildings. So on and so forth. Don't buy into the idea that most of these companies are ultra-rational actors investing only what they need for the benefit of the company. Lots of politics, gaming the numbers, and people on top trying to move more money their way in most of them.

Fair response. I guess it is probably both. Some businesses block, some just do not need the help at the going rate. And some just don't know they need it...

Yeah, it's a mix. I'm leading more toward block and dont know in your model but I steadily see some overpricing or underselling. Given the social aspects, I occasionally wonder how much underselling factors in where the people with valuable skills arent so good at selling them. That vs the companies' filters being too strong.

A) most arent uneducated nor lazy

B) them would never compete with those that were on an "educated" job at an earlier age and can bring years experience to a company

C) will drive fields to regulation and red taping because noone likes a massive influx of lower waged competition

That was not the point. Bluntly, I don't care whether the employee benefits; I, the customer, don't like talking to them and would prefer a machine. Want humans in the loop? Have them do something that they can actually do better than a machine.

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