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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

This one hits hard. As a front end developer, when people ask what I do, I say "I make buttons". Red buttons, blue buttons, big buttons, small buttons. Any kind of button you can imagine. I spend my life making buttons light up on a colorful screen. And then people click on those buttons and I get paid an obscene amount of money for it.

I'm not sure if this is how people are supposed to live. It's driving me mad.

But then I get home, order a burrito on Postmates, and am horrified at the thought of ending up as this guy delivering me a burrito at 3AM to make his rent. So I wake up the next morning to do it all over again. As a mediocre self taught developer without even a high school degree, I know I'll be right back there once the market turns down, so I don't really have the luxury of considering anything else.

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"I spend my life making buttons light up on a colorful screen."

Anything can be cynically reduced to some absurd description. You do your (very sensible) argument a disservice by doing that.

"Stamping out widgets" is the classic industrial equivalent, and the idea certainly dates back to the first craftspeople.

For instance, when their whole work is considered, nurses are essential, but their work can be similarly reduced to shuffling things around.

Don't craftspeople literally reproduce the same thing?

Reproducing the exact same button is as easy as ctrl-c,ctrl-v

I make crud apps, but shiny.

This hit a nerve. I think I hate my life as a developer, but then I see this janitor, in our office, cleaning the floor and windows, cleaning and unblocking the toilets, etc., and is always greeting me with a smile.

Makes me wonder why I deserve to be living such s luxurious life, while this guy has to spend his days waking up probably around 5am, commuting for a hour just to clean somebody else’s shit just to earn 1/3 of what I do.

I think a janitor has some advantages going for him which are pretty rare in our thing, as well as fewer issues overall.

For example, the janitor probably has concrete and relatively unchanging definitions of success in his work. His job has tangible effects every day on those he provides his service to. There aren't many janitorial meetings. He probably doesn't have to massage the ego of his boss. To my knowledge, there are no Sanitation Reviews where some coworker will criticize him for not following the One True Sanitation Style or the latest fad in Toilet Driven Development. His profession is not constantly put in the critical spotlight by the media as a front line in the culture wars. There's no such phrase as "janitor bro" which people use to stereotype and demean them.

Focusing just on "I make $X, they make $X/4, how can I complain" downplays a lot of conditions which can make some people in this line of work very bitter about it.

I agree. I've simultaneously worked as both a janitor and a developer to make ends meet. The main benefit for me working a labor job was that it was easier to switch off my brain at the end of the day. Personally I'd rather be physically exhausted then mentally drained, stressed and have it impact my sleep and mental health once the day is over. Physical work gives you a sense of satisfaction that you don't get from staring at a screen for 8 hours a day .

PCBS pay..

I’m a pretty good dev not getting paid enough - where do you work?

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