Hacker News Reader

Comment by escapologybb | Hacker News Reader

Quick question: can anybody, with a straight face explain why I as a quadriplegic software developer, Hacker, public speaker and all round pain in the arse earn less than everybody else? I'm asking because more than one person in this thread seems to think it's okay.

I haven't replied to anybody specifically because I don't want to start a flame war, but I am genuinely interested.

Slightly off topic, but I had to start my own company because finding a job when you are quadriplegic is richly impossible. Granted, quadriplegics can make terrible employees in that it's difficult to say you will definitely be at a certain place at a certain time. But it just takes a little tweaking and a little flexitime to get around the obstacle for instance.

View on HN

You shouldn't. But as a disabled person myself, I have strong opinions on this topic. I'm not a quadriplegic but I've experienced significant discrimination in hiring due to my conditions, despite being extremely productive - on both an absolute and relative basis.

Negotiating position, employers' perception of your negotiating position, perception of your productivity and potential costs.

Edit: Also maybe you were getting low-balled because they actually hoped you'd take another offer.

I don't have anything to say about 'should', but there are some clear answers for why a company might see you as a less valuable hire.

Most people have probably never worked with a quadriplegic software developer and have no idea how this impacts your productivity. That introduces risk that paying you the same as anyone else will lead to you being overpaid. Every employee has risks, but this one is pretty unique to you and all the other usual risks are still there.

Tools, practices and policies have all been built around people with a different set of requirements than you and, as an edge case, there's a good chance you'll expose some issues. If this is just a tool that isn't as effective as usually, it's lost productivity. If it is something not being ADA compliant because no one had thought about it before, the risk is potentially additional cost to fix it or litigation. The litigation risk, while perhaps unfair to you individually, definitely plays a role during your interview process.

To be blunt, I have no idea how you could do software development as a quadriplegic. Without any data to the contrary, my assumption, perhaps unfairly, is that you are less productive and you might impact the team's productivity. If I had worked with a quadriplegic developer before, if you had references to could hear from (but is it even legal to talk to references about you being quadriplegic? Would they be willing to answer honestly?) or if I had a better understanding of what software development looks like for you, that could change my assumptions. But in general, you need to prove yourself where others don't, because most people have no idea how a quadriplegic developer works.

I'd be very interested to hear how you do software development if you'd be willing to share.

If we were living in the jungle no one has to care about anything beyond their own survival, but if you live in a 'civilized' society then by definition you can't behave like you are in a jungle and there are certain responsibilities on adults.

For instance employing women may bring additional days offs due to child birth and the society has to structurally think about these things and security and well being of the entire society or the generation may well end in a single run. Short term thinking does not survive.

Greed and selfishness is not new. There are always those who live in civilized societies and all the benefits it entails but do not want the responsibilities that the word 'civilized' places on them both in thought and action, and want to pretend they are living in a jungle for purely selfish reasons.

Sure. It boils down to “No one owes you shit.” and “Life isn’t fair.”

I have high anxiety, less than perfect social skills and noise processing issues and I still spent five years teaching kindergarten. I dealt with the noise and the stress from starting a new job and then every year discovering exciting new things to stress out about as my responsibilities changed.

No one owes anyone a job and no one is owed a job. Very few people are going to hire anyone unless they think that they can make money by doing so, businesses aren’t charities. Minimum wages make hiring large numbers of people unprofitable so those people don’t get hired. The higher the minimum wage the greater that number will be. See France. The argument generalises to any cost, very much including what lawyers would call “reasonable accommodations”. If the government wants to ensure working people get paid a certain amount there’s no reason the income tax can’t go negative, subsidising lower paid, presumably low productivity workers, as with the US earned income tax credit. The same logic applies to accommodations. If employing someone is unavoidably more expensive and the government wants them employed they can either employ them or subsidise their employment.

You’ve internalised all the costs of employing you and now as far as employers are concerned you’re just another contractor. If the costs are borne by the employer then they’ll attempt to avoid them. See the drop in disabled employment following the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act[1].

[1] Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires employers to ac- commodate disabled workers and outlaws discrimination against the disabled in hiring, firing, and pay. Although the ADA was meant to increase the employment of the disabled, the net theoretical effects are ambiguous. For men of all working ages and women under 40, Current Population Survey data show a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers after the ADA went into effect. Although the number of disabled individuals receiving disability transfers increased at the same time, the decline in employment of the disabled does not appear to be explained by increasing transfers alone, leaving the ADA as a likely cause. Consistent with this view, the effects of the ADA appear larger in medium-size firms, possibly because small firms were exempt from the ADA. The effects are also larger in states with more ADA-related discrimination charges.

http://economics.mit.edu/files/17

I chided another commenter for leading with that dimissive cliché "life isn't fair", as if the OP wouldn't know that far better than either you or I do. "No one owes anyone a job and no one is owed a job" is more of the same. Comparing your anxiety to quadriplegia and advising the OP to be more like yourself seems even more patronizing. I don't mean to belittle your achievement there—it's awesome that you did that, and I'd love to hear more of the story. But as an answer to the OP's question, it's belittling in its own right.

The rest of your comment seems to include relevant details to the OP's question. I haven't read them closely enough to understand them, but from a moderation point of view your comment would been much better if you had stuck to that sort of answer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com