Hacker News Reader

I grew up dirt poor in a police no-go zone, went on to spend roughly 18 months in homeless hostels over a few years, etc.

Honestly, I feel like lots of these are related to being a poorly paid member of the tech company or having work at more working class companies.

When I started out, I literally ate toast for lunch every day because it was provided and I had no other money as time went on I got paid more and I was spending 15-25 every day on lunch. I was spending more on lunch than some people I knew would spend on food for their entire week.

The bonus at my current company was a massive issue for nearly everyone. It was constantly talked about for months because the company screwed up their finances and were talking ages to figure out what the bonus should be. Nearly everyone in my company comes from a middle class background and majority make decent money.

And the thing about the gym is probably on them, the gym is full of people all trying to better themselves and some of the most supportive people you will meet will be the gym. I would routinely tell people they look awesome and I was in awe, I would have random people come up and say well done to me that I was doing well. There are a few people who only want to hang around with other gym rats but 99% are just normal people. I remember talking to a woman who is super hot and even she felt intimidated by the gym.

The thing about stealing is a serious issue for working class companies. So many warehouses for example have security to search employees because they know if they don't lots of their product will walk out of the door with employees. I had friends that would talk about how they stole from their companies. I also heard a bunch of stories of people stealing when a company shut down.

No desire to comment on the rest of the OP points, but the one about gym was the most baffling one to me. Out of all places I could think of, gym is one of the most accepting places ever for all kinds of people (including extremely obese people).

From my own observations, people at the gym tend to fall in one of the 2 categories: they are either (a) extremely supportive or (b) totally not caring about anything but getting their own workout done and getting out. Of course there could be exceptions, but the only time i've ever even heard of such a thing happening, those types of people usually get shunned by the rest of gym goers for being assholes and ultimately banned from gyms.

In fact, more often than not, when I see a person at the gym who is clearly a very beginner (judging purely by how they are walking around for a while trying to find a specific piece of equipment, regardless of whether they are obese or not), I almost instantly see other gym goers helping them out with minor stuff or cheering them on weeks later once they accomplish a milestone. From my personal experience, the most intimidating-looking fit people at the gym end up being the nicest and most helpful towards beginners.

This sidenote aside, I find it extremely suspicious that the OP just said "It was crystal clear I don't belong" in reference to gym, without any specifics. What made it "clear" to her? The fact that she was looking at other people and realized that a lot of them were a bit further along their journey to being fit? Or did something actually happen that made her feel that way? Because a lot of her other points and complaints seem to have a lot of specifics, but this one has absolutely none.

It is also a bit strange how she is all about utilizing all other benefits and perks provided by the company, as evident by her mentioning tons of specific instances of that (no shame in that, as everyone should feel empowered to take advantage of things offered to them by the employer for free). She even rationalizes a lot of it as something due to her being from a rather poor background, even if she knows she shouldn't utilize those as much (drinking until getting sick, because it is free). But when it comes to the gym membership covered by her employer, she is totally willing to give up this perk, despite it usually being a pretty valuable perk in terms of costs covered.

Not all gyms are created equal, and it's possible she (perhaps through ignorance or lack of choice based on the reimbursement) picked one that is full of judgmental people who are already fit and just go to the gym as status signaling and/or to maintain their fitness. Also, "gym" might mean some sort of "fitness class program", so it might not just be a big room with cardio equipment, free weights, and weight machines. The fitness class type does anecdotally seem to attract more of the status-conscious people than do-your-own-exercise type gyms do. (To be completely fair, the fitness class type does of course attract a lot of people just looking for a more structured way to get into shape.)

While I agree that most gyms are great places full of supportive people (or at least people who don't give you a second look and will leave you to do your thing in peace), there are also certainly some gyms that seem to exist more as status symbols than anything else.

But still, assuming she had a choice (again, maybe the company gym perk only covered one specific gym), she absolutely should not have given up after that one experience, and should have tried another gym. I do get how it can be hard enough to get yourself to go the gym in the first place, though, and a bad experience can completely drain any motivation to continue on.

I think the author's point about stealing has more to do with the way low-wage workers are assumed to be criminals by their employers, and have to deal with various invasive security measures their employer requires.

> I think the author's point about stealing has more to do with the way low-wage workers are assumed to be criminals by their employers, and have to deal with various invasive security measures their employer requires.

Assuming that all low-wage workers are criminals is obviously bad, from a "fellow human being" point of view. And yet, the author describes stealing $350 headphones in the last lines of the article because their employer trusted them to return equipment without any oversight. Honestly not sure what point they were trying to get across by leaving that in.

Because it's the kind of thing high-salary workers do often without even considering it stealing. The headphones are used. If someone has a bougie enough job, they probably expect not to be assigned used headphones, and they don't think through whether the company would be selling them on because they certainly wouldn't bother in their own life. Alternately, there is a mindset of "oh, well, it'd be more money to clean them than they're worth at this point, they're just going to throw them out" (mentally estimating from the effort at the rate that that person is paid, not at the rate earned by the person who'd get stuck with the cleaning). Personally, I've seen people do this in ways I find shocking. The author is pointing out that she has also been affected by her environment, that she also has changed to act in ways she would have found unbelievable prior. I don't think it's trying to say "look I've advanced to act like these people".

IME employee "shrinkage" has less to do with opportunity (remember, employees know the security posture of their workplace; if the public has access, engineering around them is not difficult), and more to do with motive. That is, shrinkage increases when employees are underpaid and disrespected. As is common everywhere, observation of arbitrary rules is down to the push-pull of saving face vs survival. So the issue is not the purported exceptional criminality of low-wage workers, but the low wage itself.

The aforementioned security posture is also often misaligned. I've worked at a warehouse where the only things that could be stolen are fill hoses and washing machines. Clearly, no one was walking out with anything of significance, but we still had to empty our pockets and step through a metal detector every time we hit the floor. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars of easily-pocketable personal electronics disappeared from another warehouse; no metal detector.

> - The part of stealing I don't find relatable, even when my bank account was empty I would never resort to stealing, must be some honour system I grew up with

Do you mean the last bit about the Macbook and the headphones, or the bit about the snacks? The snacks were more of a "it is fundamentally impossible to steal cheap stuff because we have infinite cheap stuff, why do you even care that someone took it!" mindset.

I was referring to this phrase:

> Because they have never been poor, they had no idea what I might do. Why would I steal, when everyone clearly has enough?

from how I understood it, because she has been poor, she had reasons for stealing.

In companies I worked for the snacks are there for being taken, I notice in every company I worked for there's the rule "the company is going to put stuff in the kitchen in some common areas, everyone is free to take them", I did always ask to a colleague about that, just to be sure I don't steal the pack of chips another colleague left there.

> from how I understood it, because she has been poor, she had reasons for stealing.

No, it says that nobody even considered that she might steal, because rich people don't see the point of stealing when stuff is so cheap relative to their wealth that it's effectively free.

That's why nobody bothered to even escort her, stealing just didn't even occur to them at all.

Thanks, I got the wrong reasoning, it's not that she might steal, it's that people that has never been poor don't think stealing is an option.

Yep, exactly! Because why would someone steal when they can just go on Amazon and have the thing delivered?

I believe it depends on the value of the object and the chances of getting caught. If you steal a macbook in an office full of cameras is a bad deal. If you steal a macbook every other day in an office without any camera is a good deal.

And the second option is exactly what happened in an office I worked on, at some point enough people complained that their macbook was stolen and they installed cameras.

Funny thing in the same office my lunch was stolen once a week and that just became a joke during stand-ups "did they stole your lunch today?"

Didn't anyone bother to set up the MacBook activation locks? Or did people steal MacBooks anyway just to throw them away later when they turn out to be unusable?

> Didn't anyone bother to set up the MacBook activation locks?

The macbooks were handled by the IT department, everyone was just using them, so I don't know if such a function was enabled, the only security measures I know there were are remote login and disk encryption.

I don't know what the person that stole the macbooks did with them, but because he/she stole more than one I believe he/she was able to make a profit

I'm from Spain and I find relatable. I've been in places where I didn't have to eat, so when people orders food every day I just compute in my head how much money goes to waste.

Another thing that I do, is consider the ability to repair tech without lock-in. Being a techie poor teachs you to be careful about this decisions, but people seem perfectly fine to be locked in and just buy new stuff every time.

There has been a lot of time since I don't buy new tech. My phone is second hand, my laptop is a second hand ThinkPad, I have two Eizo Screens that came through ebay, my upgraded desktop has an I5 from ebay, and RAM is probably second hand too, I don't remember.

> how much money goes to waste.

Eh, it doesn't go to waste, it goes to other people.

> Being a techie poor teachs you to be careful about this decisions, but people seem perfectly fine to be locked in and just buy new stuff every time.

Yes, this is a big one! Ever since I got into hardware as a hobby I can repair many more devices with a 3D-printed part or replacing a burnt component, now I'm horrified at how often people will just get a new device. Repair shops should be more common, and repair should be easier, as that is truly wasting money (because you're throwing away a usually perfectly usable device that just needs a bit of repair).