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Comment by troupe | Hacker News Reader

> this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's

If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste.

I think waste is a bit strong, but our society is closer to an oligarchy than a meritocracy, and a side effect of this is that we have many talented people doing menial work so they can afford to better themselves because they don't have the wealth and connections of someone from a different social class, even if some of the people from that other class are less talented.

With that said, it is a meritocracy to some degree, but it's only that for the very best, who also conform to other (arbitrary) standards. Everyone else has to grind through. I think the worst part is that it's presented as something else, which a lot of people buy into.

I think this response and some others vastly underestimate the value and complexity of „unskilled“ or „menial“ work.

I ultimately respect middle class nerds with a sense for abstraction and upper class leaders with fine manners and so on. But the worker, who had to make hard tradeoffs, learn to serve and deal with having little, is naturally on a different level.

You don’t know the value of work, if you never _had_ to work.

And I think the world would be a better place if the most powerful understood that.

I think that's true. But nevertheless it's not right that those from certain backgrounds should have to do this work while those from others do not.

I mean if that were true then he could afford rent, clothing, a $10 library card, healthcare, education, etc.

Like there's this peculiar mentality in America that is absolutely psychotic. While those so called "menial tasks" are no doubt important, rather invaluable to functioning of society, we should not imply let alone pretend, that they provide enough. So in terms of sheer economic value, if we believe our current way of measuring labor, those "menial tasks" are in fact not valuable. Because if they were they could provide a decent life, let alone being able to provide roof over your head.

What I find bewildering is how so many Americans, even here, can justify the sheer waste of time, and psychological trauma, with "If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste".

Such justifications either feel like exuding gross privilege or worse a result of some mass Stockholm Syndrome.

The idea is that a menial job shouldn’t be seen as a prison sentence. The problem is that Americans (and their cultural sphere) seem to hate the working class, I don’t know when this happened but it drips from the tongues of so many people even while they bemoan the conditions they’re forced into. You really fucked up somewhere. Working class jobs are not bad if they pay well and have benefits and time off. Any job sucks if it doesn’t. You don’t pay people based on economic value, they get paid what they can negotiate. I see a lot of negotiating happening in the future.

I agree with the overall point, but I don't agree that those who "came up from the bottom" are sort of magically imbued with this moral superiority that

> But the worker, who had to make hard tradeoffs, learn to serve and deal with having little, is naturally on a different level.

Implies. Take running for example. No one in modern society "needs" to run, but I took up endurance running and doing something like running a marathon teaches you a lot. Probably many of the same lessons you're imagining.

All that to say, growing up poor I'd agree is probably pretty likely to imbue you with those learnings. It doesn't mean that people who haven't experienced scarcity have never learned those lessons.

> You don’t know the value of work, if you never _had_ to work.

I know there is a lot of negativity towards hard work not paying off nowadays, but doing the work you're talking about when I was younger has carried me through life. At a minimum, I wake up every morning amazed that I'm getting paid to play with and figure things out on a computer. It's a long ways from when I was a barely a teenager and my dad made me help him split firewood (he sold) using the hydraulic splitter or pick and sort oysters (he also sold in season), or the other random jobs I had until my first programming job in college.

And you're also right about there being some complexity in all jobs. I could go on about all the important lessons I learned at my various jobs that have helped me my entire career.

> I think this response and some others vastly underestimate the value and complexity of „unskilled“ or „menial“ work.

IMHO the parent poster is not talking about, let’s say the “inherent” value of such work, but the value our society places on it when it comes to money - aka when it comes to acquiring the basic necessities and securities of life and what it takes to live a decent life in the modern world.

Otherwise, I agree with your comment 100% and suspect several of the other posters do too.

That's it. The majority of these jobs keep the lights on and are very difficult, but the pay is not commensurate to those characteristics. It should be, but it's not.

That, consumerism, and the narrative that this country is mostly a meritocracy serve as effective barriers to people moving out of their socio-economic positions even if they are talented, hard working, and so on.

I mean menial in the sense that these jobs don't have pay that reflects their difficulty and importance.

During college I worked on the dock for an LTL trucking company, and it was difficult. The pay was about double minimum wage, but given the difficulty, risk, and importance of what we did, the pay should have been more.

It also doesn't take into account all the people who might have spent all that money and time and still not ended up with an education or a piece of paper, if the education were just handed to them for free.

This isn't so far from home for me because I had a niece community college scholarship and then my parents' money to pay for my college, and I ended up not getting that degree. Years later, I got serious about it and took out my own loans to get a degree and a job. The first time around I had no plans and no idea what I was doing, but the second time I had a plan and a goal, and I achieved it. And I paid off my debt myself.

The initial money wasn't entirely wasted, but most of those credits didn't transfer towards my degree.

That was just a CC, but imagine if it was a 6 yr degree at a University instead. It'd be vastly more costly.

I've definitely seen a difference between college students who are there because they are paying their own money to make an investment in themselves and kids that feel society owes them a degree.

Congratulations on having a plan, following it, and then paying off your education. It is good to hear people saying that when so many stories are of people who never had a plan that are now complaining it is too hard to pay off all the debt they took on.

It wasn't a personal waste, but it was an inefficient allocation of our overall resources. There are a lot of kids who don't care about college at all but don't have to work through it either. In an ideal world, the people who would work the hardest in college would get the free rides, because not only do they benefit from it the most, we all benefit from them the most.

I think you are assuming that the person in question having a PhD would be better for society as a whole than the path he chose. I don't think that is necessarily a given.

The amount of extra money you can make, and by extension the value you create, by entering the workforce four years earlier dwarfs the value created by the four years of restaurant work.

> he was paying for his own college so he had to work for a year (restaurant jobs) to pay for each semester of college.

It wasn't four years, it was eight! The poor guy had to work a YEAR for every semester of college. The amount of value lost to society due to a lack of affordable education is unbelievable.

> The poor guy had to work a YEAR for every semester of college

Is it unusual for people to pay off their college loans over 8+ years? It sounds to me like he prioritized avoiding debt.

Education is absolutely affordable. You can take all kinds of college courses for free online from sites like EdX, Coursera, MIT's Open Courseware, etc. What is not free is a diploma. You have to pay for that. If you want an affordable diploma, you can go to schools that have low tuition in a lower cost part of the country. Last time I ran the numbers it wasn't hard to find a school where you could work part time during the year and full time during the summer and pay for tuition, books, and living expenses while graduating with $0 to $2000 in debt. You can do even better by starting at a community college or if you have some skill that is worth more than minimum wage.

Education is more affordable now than at any point in history because so much of it is free. Diplomas can be expensive or they can be less expensive depending on how much you want to pay.

Aaaaand none of that matters when it comes to getting a job, except, maybe, for certain areas of software development.

And yeah he prioritized avoiding debt the same way a hungry animal prioritizes avoiding starvation.

What do you mean by "none of that"? troupe mentioned a lot of things, including ways to educate yourself and ways to get a diploma. Those seem relevant to me in areas besides just software development.

Oh - I may have missed a part of the post but the impression I got was that the resources / actions listed didn’t include the kind of accredited degrees which look good on a resume and that employers often care about. Like the online courses and such - few employers (I think?) put a lot of weight in those, especially relative to a decent college or university.

Forgive me if I missed something.

This is sheer wealth-class prejudice. Any fee-gated access to higher education represents a detriment to humanity. The notion that it's fine to maintain access barriers to the poor because they might squander their opportunity to benefit society is beyond crass; it is the offensively amoral age-old message to the downtrodden: be grateful for what we let you have at all.

What this actually represents: a systemic means to preserve the stratification of power and wealth, and to hell with human progress 'cos I got mine.

See also: barbaric healthcare practices, such as individual billing.

What if was Stephen Hawkins?

His SAT or ACT score would have been high enough that schools would have been offering him scholarships to attend. It doesn't take Hawking level intelligence to get a full ride scholarship.

I think parent is after Stephen Hawkins, not Hawking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawkins

With a g, sorry!

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