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Comment by jdludlow | Hacker News Reader

You can tell a lot about a person by the way that he treats waiters, waitresses, janitors, clerks, and other lower paying service jobs.

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Nassim Taleb had a good quote that can be stretched to fit this. "Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them."

It's more enlightened self-interest or utilitarianism than categorical imperative, but the gist is the same. Don't ignore the people you foolishly regard as unimportant.

To quote from the other end of the spectrum,"The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not f--- with us."

Oh come on, it's _not_ about having people "remember who slighted them".

It's about not being a dick.

Most people understand this just fine - you don't be a dick to the CEO or the Venture Capitalist because you're not a dick. You don't be a dick to the waitress or the janitor because you're not a dick. It's pretty easy.

_Some_ people though, have to work hard at not being a dick to the investors 'cause there's something in it for them, and don't bother working hard at not being a dick to waitresses. The only reason they have any trouble with it is because they _are_ dicks.

And as the article and a lot of these comments point out, other people _do_ notice.

I've heard a variant of this as "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."

While that's a good quote, it's not quite relevant for people such as waiters. In my experience, being polite and tipping generously regularly gets me a speedier and more pleasant service. Sometimes it won't make a difference, sometimes it will make even more of a difference, such as a free drink or two, but more often than not it does have a positive impact on the service you receive.

That's true not just with waiters, but in many service situations - for example, in Oxford (a fairly small city with fairly low numbers of taxis required) a lot of the drivers know me, and when I call for a ride it takes a taxi, in my experience, roughly half the average time to arrive, simply because the drivers on duty know that I will be a pleasant customer and a good tipper.

Getting better service shouldn't be a neccesary reason to treat people well, but it's certainly a nice bonus.

In fact, that's why I was careful to call it a variant; my sentiments are the same as yours. I'm actually happy that you've articulated the distinction.

..and the brilliantly insightful but ironic quote:

I don’t hire people who have to be told to be nice. I hire nice people.--Leona Helmsley

Trying to dig up the source for this quote leads to quite an array of people it's been attributed to! So far I've turned up variants sourced to: Abigail van Buren (the old name of "Dear Abby"), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a Reader's Digest letter-writer named James D. Miles, and Malcolm S. Forbes. Most of the attributions are questionable, though (e.g. I haven't found anybody actually pointing to where in Goethe's works such a quote can be found).

In case you were curious of a source, this link cites Ann Landers as the author.

http://quotationsbook.com/quote/40407

I have heard of companies that actually have their secretaries weigh in on what candidate should receive job offers based on how the secretary was treated when no one was looking.

More broadly, you can tell a lot about a person by the way he treats people who can do absolutely nothing for him.

Expanding on that, you can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its least valuable members.

When you need your shoes polished, that food you ordered served or the litter picked up from the front drive, suddenly the "least valuable people" are just as valuable as you are.

Nobody's "least valuable" unless their entire existence seems to serve to act to the detriment to absolutely everybody around them.

'Least valuable' is not the employed poor. They're the entrenched criminals and severely mentally ill - those who only consume resources and can't be rehabilitated.

Your comment got me thinking. (The best kind of comment.)

My first thought on reading it was: is that equivalence valid? A society is a collective; a collective functions at the behest of its members. My experience of human nature suggests to me that society will contain members who both are and aren't kind to "less valuable" members. So can, or should, a society enforce kindness towards them, even against the members who are disinclined to be so?

Another related question: should we measure a society's value by its total accumulated success, or the success afforded to its "less valuable"?

I don't claim to know the answers.

If I had to choose a single simple measure, it would be the median level of quality of life.

The HDI tries to evaluate that, check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality...

Total accumulated success is easily shown to be a false measure with a thought experiment. Consider two thousand-person communities, one full of middle-class professionals, and one with a single multi-billionaire and the rest are all downbeaten impoverished workers. You'd have to be pretty crazy to suggest that the one with widespread crushing poverty is a better society.

I recently read a small autobiographical book by Richard Branson, and apparently at one point he took part in a TV show where he would judge aspiring employees. I thought it very cool that he disguised himself as an elderly driver who picked up the aspirants from the airport and noted how he was treated.

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That's really no excuse. Don't go on 2-3 hours of sleep a night if that means you can't treat people around you with respect. Or, at least, don't venture out among people who don't understand and appreciate the situation you're in.

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First, you always have a choice. It just that the alternatives aren't always so attractive.

Second, OK, so excuse may be the wrong word - but I disagree that it doesn't say something (negative) about a person who puts him self in a situation where he will be yelling at waitresses.

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"...makes 1 mistake of being rude to the waiter..."

This is where you are losing everyone. A mistake is forgetting your keys or making a math error on a spreadsheet. Treating someone with no respect, hitting someone, etc. Are not "mistakes".

I really wish I could see the deleted comments.

A lack of sleep creates stress. There are a lot of other ways to create stress. Time pressure, money pressure, conflict, disappointment, home life, and embarrassment all create stress.

When getting into business with a partner, you need to know how they will deal with stress. If this person does not deal well with stress when faced with a little sleep deprivation, especially over something as simple as coffee, then it's a huge red flag.

Imagine that it's crunch time, you're all running on minimal sleep, and you're trying to get a demo perfectly solid so you can either get your next round of funding or sell to interested parties; i.e., there's a lot on the line.

Do you really want this type of person shrieking at everyone in the room because they're not typing fast enough? Do you think that's going to help you and the team?

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That is simply a luxury of time you often cannot afford. Who knows when his next explosion could come? Could be in 6 months at crunch time. Unless you're desperate for the help then it's best not to get in to bed with this kind of person - yep based off that one experience.

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