Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway7281 | Hacker News Reader

The crisis just illustrates our stratified, ossified society: the "essential" workers are those who barely get by. Supposedly important people ("I need to fly around all week") are not that important after all, but for many reasons some professions are able to extract much more value than they contribute (which is an essence of business, after all).

Sad to see, but not very surprising.

Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.

View on HN

I'm quite young, and have gone from a minimum wage service worker to a well paid software engineer in a relatively short time. A couple years ago I remarked to my dad that it seemed the more I was paid, the less stressful my work was. He said that he had found the same in his career. At the same time, the more I am paid, the more difficult it is to find someone that knows how to do what I'm doing.

I know it's been said before, but it seems pay is not dependent on how useful to society you are, but is instead dependent on two factors working in tandem.

1) Do those with money perceive you to have a use?

2) How difficult is it to find someone else that can replace your use?

I can't help but wonder if stress to pay ratio works as an inverted bell curve. At the lowest levels of pay you find the most stress. Then we move to middle/lower-upper class levels of pay and find much less stress. To get above those levels of pay, you'll likely have to start your own company or work extreme hours at a high skill job and once again experience heightened levels of stress.

This is very interesting to me. Why did you feel higher stress in lower wage positions?

I only ask because I worked low-to-minimum wage part time jobs from ages 14-22 before graduating from school and getting a "real" job, similar to SWE. I found the eact opposite: stress increased with $.

I always felt low stress in service jobs because I knew exactly what to do every moment, and knew exactly what happens if something goes wrong. Moreover, I knew I could find another job pretty quickly if worse came to worse - there's just so many places that need waiters, factory workers, cashiers, baristas...

In contrast, my new job often has vague tasks and expectations, constant evaluation against my peers, and much more complex outcomes - all of which drive stress for me.

So for me, I get stressed when I have less control over my work / time / etc.

The less you make, the more they tell you exactly what to do, when and how to do it and you lose flexibility. There's no trust.

As I've moved up, I'm largely trusted to know what I'm doing. I can basically set my own hours, do what work I think is impactful and nobody really checks in on me. Some days I accomplish very little and nobody cares, other days, I accomplish a lot.

Bonus points in that I have tons of employee protections (I wouldn't be fired without at least a large severance) and I have so much money saved that I don't need to work for long periods of time. My healthcare is covered and my living finances are less than a quarter of my base salary.

My guess would be (having had the exact same experience): - greater autonomy and less micro-management for skilled jobs - more job security because you are difficult to replace

On the other side high skill jobs are more stressful because the stakes are higher and the techniques for success are more uncertain.

In my experience, high skill jobs are less stressful when I am doing something I have prior work experience and I have confidence in my ability. When I don't they can be extremely stressful.

> high skill jobs are less stressful when I am doing something I have prior work experience ... When I don't they can be extremely stressful

This makes sense. I tend to jump between roles (DS, PM, consultant, etc.), which might account for some stress come to think of it...

that's because you're talking about competency stress and the parent is talking about existential stress. because stress is primal, it's easy to conflate the two, but they're not the same.

as you get older, your ability to depend (at least as a fallback) on parents diminishes (in many dimensions, not just financially).

I generally found that it's reverse.

In lower paid jobs, and especially in menial jobs like when I was selling newspapers on street corners for fixed salary in HS, you work fixed time and 100% check out at the end of the day. Next day is clean slate. At a more involved office job you'd still check out as far as work as concerned, but office politics / boss had a bad day / etc. carry over. As a generic SWE you can't ever fully check out because the state of the project, the long term goals and current problems are always in your head - both the work, and the people. As a highly paid SWE working on online system, you sometimes can literally never check out because of on call, and because if something goes really wrong they'd call you even if you aren't on call.

If you love your job it's great, or at any rate acceptable (I can never get used to on call, so it's a necessary evil for me). As soon as you are on a crappy project or team, it sucks. I'd rather sell newspapers than work on a crappy software project if it paid the same.

I think the false perception of less stress in higher paid jobs actually comes from money itself (and status). You both have more cushion and so feel less dependent on a job, and are/feel less easily replaceable.

I think the stress that people with lower pay experience is related to what companies can get away with due to lax employment laws.

Yes but that does not change the fact that most of us are doing useless work in terms of value. Yes, there is a moat, yes one is not as replaceable (though that is not necessarily true) but a lot of our work is meaningless valueless crap.

Essential workers are not scarce. You need someone to do the job, but there is no shortage of qualified candidates. Hiring and training them is not a huge investment, and they are somewhat fungible. A department store could replace its entire staff within a week or two with no dip in productivity.

On the other hand, a few disgruntled knowledge workers can send a company into a death spiral if enough of them quit at once.

I guess companies don't care so much about their labourers, because there's an unlimited supply of them. Their skilled workers are perceived as an investment, because they're expensive to replace and shape the direction a company takes.

This argument was used by any number of consumer electronics outlets, and it was never true. Expert floor staff are not fungible. Only poor floor staff are fungible.

It's not even true in department stores. It's simply not true that you can pick someone off the street and train them to sell cosmetics, high-end clothing, or even furniture in a few days.

You can train them to do a bad job quickly, but they're not going to find their stride for a good few months.

I dunno, that may once have been true, back when expertise on the show room floor was either par for course or else a competitive differentiator. To me it looks like that the industry made a conscience decision to cost cut expertise from hiring equation. Essentially, the big box guys (who hire most of the employees) are practically self serve. The associates are certainly fungible.

When I was working retail (in consumer electronics), this was not the case. I was replaced quickly and effortlessly. My resignation wasn't the mic drop I thought it would be.

They don't need experts. They pay minimum wage. They need people to push extended warranties.

I was having a similar conversation a few days ago. I think that people are conflating how essential a function is with how essential any given person in that function is.

That doesn't apply at all to doctors, pharmacists, firemen, police and most essential workers.

That's true. I guess I was just thinking about specific people and answered to that.

> A department store could replace its entire staff within a week or two with no dip in productivity.

Worked in food service and not retail, but I'm going to call bull on this.

If even one of our best left we were screwed for however many weeks it took to find a replacement.

That is when they give two weeks, not when they walk out.

It's simply not true that all essential workers do low skilled jobs.

It's not. I accidentally implied that, but that wasn't my intention.

You are mixing up essential and scarce.

Here is an analogy: Just because water is essential does not imply that water will be always more expensive than gold if water is available everywhere.

This may sound harsh but it is almost a universally true law of human behavior.

> Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.

Keep going! You've already made it about 90% of the way to Marxism. The interests of capital and labor are at odds, because capital has no way to extract value from the world without labor. This means capital has strong incentives to keep labor in its place, which leads to situations where billionaires can massively increase their wealth as a result of a global pandemic that shuts down much of the economy, but workers suffer as a result.

I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Scientifically and even theoretically, there is no evidence that Marxism has worked or will work in the future.

There is a reason people from more socialist countries flee to less socialist countries like the US despite any problems in the US.

Nowadays, we can’t even fully split up labor and capital as though they are two different sets of people as it was in the days of Marx.

Everything is a spectrum. Going to any of the ends (pure capitalism or pure communism) will be a disaster.

Do you think no one in the US suffers horribly?

Consider the bankruptcies, the imprisonment-for-profit, the financial corruption, the racist police violence, the homelessness, the opiate scandals, the gun violence, the fact that most of the population has no safety net of any kind - and that's nowhere close to being a complete list.

There were privileged people in the Soviet Union who were doing just fine, and they had no interest in how well the system was working for everyone else.

We know how that ended.

It's very, very unwise to assume that the US can't possibly make the same mistake.

Have you considered that "more socialist" countries might have done better had other countries not felt the need to "bring democracy to," or "liberate" them? Or lured them into massive arms races that ultimately neither side could afford?

A lot of people from India and China move to the US. How did the US interfere in India?

Shouldn’t socialist countries be more robust to interference from capitalist countries if they are inherently better?

Otherwise, they seem weak geopolitically and won’t survive long.

Both India and China are market economies. Market economies have the property that certain people can succeed wildly, but also that certain people are left behind. This explains why people leave.

How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question.

That is false.

India was a socialist nightmare. Only recently has it switched to a market economy. It is still recovering and will take decades to recover. This is all well-known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind...

China recently lost its legal status as a market economy.

https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/china-lose...

I thought these were well known. If you are willing to rectify this, I am willing to engage more, but respectfully decline to continue further otherwise.

> How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question

You can’t that’s why pure communism/socialism is a disaster almost always.

A better question is why other countries with US interference like Japan and South Korea have ended up being much more richer than before. North Korea without any US interference is much much poorer. (It is almost like a controlled experiment) Why is that?

I am aware of this. India has been a market economy since the 90s. Is almost 30 years not enough for the magic of markets to improve the situation?

Regarding China, "legal status" is irrelevant. Prices in China are set via market mechanisms. That is a market economy, period. Your link boils down to this:

> According to the EU, China subsidizes its industries to a great extent, particularly steel and aluminum, making their sales prices in the international market unfair.

This is essentially saying China is using market mechanisms that the EU does not like.

Moreover, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_market_economy#Marke..., "Julan Du and Chenggang Xu analyzed the Chinese model in a 2005 paper to assess whether it represents a type of market socialism or capitalism. They concluded that China's contemporary economic system represents a form of capitalism rather than market socialism...."

Rectified.

In response to your edit: "Currently a majority of North Koreans are dependent on markets for their survival." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangmadang. North Korea is also a market economy.

In what way has the US interfered in South Korea or Japan since 1950? How does that compare to being sanctioned and embargoed by every major Western nation? Would you like to hear about Cuba instead?

Please stop. Ideological and nationalistic flamewar on the internet is tedious, predictable, and therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Which part offends: my defense of the claim that India, China, and North Korea are market economies, or the part about how the US interferes in other nations' affairs? Can you be more specific as to what I'm to stop? Did I not mention UBI and land value taxes enough, or something?

None of that. It's the tedious and predictable aspects.

These arguments are an endless carousel. They turn nasty and convince no one. If that's the game you want to play on the internet, there are other carnivals.

> Is almost 30 years not enough for the magic of markets to improve the situation

We are leaving out the 300 years of colonialism. And 50 years of socialism. 30 years is not enough to move a billion people out of the ills of socialism and colonialism

The US stopped interfering in South America by the 90s. By your own logic, how long do the socialist countries in South America need to recover from US interference? 10 years? 30 years? 100 years? 1000 years?

>In response to your edit: "Currently a majority of North Koreans are dependent on markets for their survival." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangmadang. North Korea is also a market economy.

You are missing the point here. The illicit market economy is what is helping them survive the legal socialist economy. Thank the market economy for saving the NK.

> In what way has the US interfered in South Korea or Japan since 1950? How does that compare to being sanctioned and embargoed by every major Western nation? Would you like to hear about Cuba instead?

Care to tell me first how the US has interfered in Mexico?

Please stop. Ideological and nationalistic flamewar on the internet is tedious, predictable, and therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly.

Since Marx’s time, basically every country in the developed West has gone in the direction of Marx’s prescriptions, driven largely by Marxists and other socialists (often through the labor movements as vehicles).

You're probably confused by confusing Leninism and it's descendants with Marxism, a piece of Leninist propaganda that capitalists have been prone to adopt as their own. But Leninism abandons central features of Marxism to avoid Marxists dependendencies on the existence of advanced capitalism and broad working-class consciousness, in favor of an centralized authoritarian system designed to be implemented in pre-capitalist societies under a narrow elite. But even if Leninism can be seen as a form of Marxism rather than a massive deviation from it, itself a debatable point, it clearly would even then be a subset of, and not coextensive with Marxism, so it would be still improper to limit “went in that [Marxist] direction” to adopting Leninism or one of it's descendants.

The states non-Leninist socialists, including Marxist Communists, described as “state capitalism” aren't “more socialist” (and certainly not more Marxist) than the states which adopted a subset of the Marxist program in the conditions for which Marx prescribed them.

As I said, everything is a spectrum, even Adam Smith wanted capitalism with regulation.

What would you say defines Marxism and Leninism? I have spent countless hours and have arrived at the conclusion that most definitions of these are inconsistent and informal.

I will be happy to engage with you if you have a formal and concise definition and I will be ready to change my stance based on that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com