I find that people who have never experienced being poor are often lacking in both humility and "can do" attitudes.
For me, not being wealthy is a feature, not a bug. I realize I'm speaking from a place of privilege now, though.
Rich kid will thinks they're poor if they're low on petty cash, or if their phone is two years old and has a cracked screen. They never worry that they'll not be able to pay for their phone next month, or have skip a meal to make rent.
I grew up in a well-off-but-frugal household, so I had a lot of the poverty markers listed, but for me they were frugality markers.
The core of poverty isn't the visible markers. Anyone can have those. It's the pervasive stress of not having money, constantly being on the precipice of your life going into a sudden, deep dive. I never had that. Even when I earned ~$13k/year in Americorps, I was fine because I had no debt, I was used to living cheaply, and I knew that if it really came down to it, my parents could help me out. The poor high school students I worked with had the opposite family situation: they'd miss school because family depended on them to help with the bills.
If I ever have kids, I feel like I'll need to go out of my way to ensure they don't grow up segregated into wealthy enclaves. The US is sorted by income--neighborhoods, schools, social circles, and workplaces--and it makes us blind to others' situations. I don't want them to be constantly stressed about money, but it's important to be able to handle financial constraints, and to be aware and understand of the actual reality so many people live with.
[0] https://thedailytexan.com/2019/04/25/median-family-income-of...
It is largely a matter of luck to be in a situation where you don't have to worry about maintaining a certain appearance, and developing some empathy for those who do has been an important positive change for me.
In fact, as you hint, having been poor and then getting in to the middle class you probably have a better chance of making it big.
I'm going to call BS on that. Written communication is a high-leverage activity that if you are going to the trouble of having a dedicated position for it, paying that person well is a pretty good idea. Perhaps not as well as an engineering role of similar seniority, but about as well as a design or QA role (and for similar reasons).
Paying that person less than an intern is both shortsighted and insulting.
If you actually have a dedicated writer on staff (as opposed to outsourcing it to a marketing agency), paying them less than an intern is as mind-bogglingly stupid as paying a full time designer less than an intern.
BTW, nurses may get paid less than engineers, but they don't get paid less than medical residents, which is a more appropriate parallel to an engineering intern.
The way I read it, it implies that the receptionist got paid more than than the interns. Either way, she got paid less even than than receptionist, which is generally not exactly a high-paid job.
It's also not clear to me what exactly her job was by the way?
I don't know how things are in the US, but I've never seen interns being paid more than a token amount in Europe. You generally take on interns as a public service and to spot potential talent to hire, not because they're good/productive programmers. A good internship requires quite a lot of guidance from a senior developer.