Americans Are Pretty Skeptical That Hard Work Will Pay Off | Hacker News Reader

Americans Are Pretty Skeptical That Hard Work Will Pay Off

theatlantic.com

121 pointspaulpauper165 comments

My experience is that i had to work harder the lower my position in life was.

The way I was treated, the physical, emotional, and mental toil i suffered were worse at minimum wage jobs than any job i had in IT. The bottom tier of IT has a much worst experience as well compared to development and systems engineering jobs.

It makes me wonder about these people who went to college, then straight into a six figure job out of college claiming to understand how the world works. I can't help but raise my eyebrow at anybody making economic claims and claims about what people should do who have never tried to make rent making below 30k a year in a major American city.

That has also been my experience.

When I was 16, I cleaned dishes in a restaurant for a few weeks, for a few hundred bucks total. That was the most exhausting job I ever had, and the other folks there didn’t treat me respectfully at all. Cheap lighting, standing upright all day, handling _huge_ pots that the cook burnt („There, I made an oopsie, clean this up before you go“) - I can’t recommend that. I was not supposed to be in contact with customers either, so didn’t even get to know anybody. If you‘d press me to find anything good about that job, it’s probably that I can now appreciate the hard work many people have to do in order to make rent.

Compare that to my freelance iOS dev job where my worst complaint is that I sit in too many meetings.

Same. As a teenager I was on my feet all day as a server and bused my own tables as well. It was exhausting then and I was an athlete.

Work hard when you are young so you can be lazy later if you want. Maybe you will always work hard because you like it, but give yourself the option.

> Work hard when you are young so you can be lazy later if you want. Maybe you will always work hard because you like it, but give yourself the option.

Great advice. Start really early with honors/AP English classes and you might not even have to work that hard at all. Nothing teaches you to bullshit your way to success better than high school literature classes, which is a critical skill for lazy but productive engineers/managers who need to communicate their contributions instead of prostrating "work ethic."

Hard agree. I will never have a job as hard as the summers I spent working food service or cleaning pools. You had to be on your feet all day for pennies, working fast to handle annoying customers.

Software is no comparison. You get to sit in a nice chair and listen to music all day while you essentially do puzzles.

The lower you are in the organization the more work you are likely doing and the less flexibility you have.

As you ascend the organizational ladder what matters is your ability to organize and motivate others, relationship building and communication skills, and your general vision / insights / experience.

The above means that you can be pretty lazy later in your career if you are just highly competent at those things. If you are hard working it certainly helps, but give me a lazy but competent and fair leader over a hard working incompetent one any day.

However for bottom of the org chart employees hard work and accuracy of work are most valued.

I don't disagree with your general take although it matters what sort of higher-level position. It's true that a senior individual contributor can potentially cruise if they can churn out quality work quickly. But senior execs mostly work pretty hard, (normally) a ton of travel, lots of calls at all hours of the day and night, etc.

ADDED: Not sure why people disagree with this. Yes, those senior execs are well-paid (some would say excessively paid at the largest companies) for their hard (as in long hours/stress) work, but it doesn't mean they're just taking it easy.

I agree. It is a different type of work, but it is a lot of work nonetheless. There is a greater degree of flexibility afforded to executives and many consider the actual work much more desirable. I think many have trouble understanding the value that a good executive brings and seeing the types of work that they do as "real."

Yeah, as a senior IC, I have a lot of flexibility compared to an exec who probably has most of their day scheduled including late night calls. And I fully appreciate this when I'm on a "road trip" of some sort when I'm pretty much scheduled from breakfast through post-dinner.

And sure, a senior exec has freedom to say that this AM doesn't work for me--reschedule things. But there are still a lot of meetings/calls at odd hours.

I think most people have this weird idea that execs don't actually do anything and their job is ridiculously easy.

If you are a manager and work hard then you are doing a bad job. A good manager will make sure that his team has the skills and autonomy to make the right decisions without constantly involving him/her. Leaving the manager to focus on identifying and improving the current bottleneck (Theory of Constraints style).

I mostly agree with you but I do think you’re missing the most important piece: who has power and leverage.

Low level employees don’t have much power (in the US at least) so they’re overworked and underpaid. Senior leadership are literally the people who make the rules, so they’re not going to force the same degrading conditions on themselves as they put on low level workers.

Then there’s something like the cushy engineering jobs some of us have in SV, that’s because they have power in the form of a labor shortage and can demand good working conditions.

> ...have power in the form of a labor shortage...

It can be much more than this. A short order cook might prepare $1,500 worth of food in a shift. $30,000 in a month. It's hard work in a busy diner.

As an extreme example, at one point, WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. That's 10,000,000 users per engineer. If a user was worth $1/month, they were each responsible for $10,000,000 per month in revenue.

That's an extreme, but even at my company, for example, one engineer is responsible for about $200,000/month in revenue.

I hear that and I do think that raises the ceiling for pay, since you can pay engineers a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still a net positive.

If there was a surplus of engineering talent I guarantee you our salaries would drop significantly, no matter how much profit we generate. Under capitalism, there’s no incentive to scale workers’ pay based on how much value they bring. Even in your examples, the engineers that pull in 200k/month for the company are making a tiny fraction of that, and if they start making 400k/month on average it’s unlikely salaries would increase if pressures in the labor market are unchanged.

Edited for clarity

What does that have to do with capitalism, or any -ism?

You would not pay $4 to seller A for the same apple that seller B is selling for $1. Attempting to maximize utility to cost ratio is natural, maybe even necessary as it would convey evolutionary advantages.

I think that OP just means that capitalism, as a system, has absolutely no incentive to increase wages as productivity increases, it's a race for profits so extracting maximum profit is the metric. It's this reliance on a single metric that, for me personally, is a major failure of the current economic system to provide not only wealth and innovation but also good standards of living for people.

I'm a bit of a humanist and quite leftist in my views though, not a communist by any means but I will always try to look into economic systems with this more humane optic.

The problem is you can pull any old programmer in off the streets to work on the stuff that brings in 200k/mo per person, so I'm doubtful there will be a surplus of engineering talent at the desired skill level.

Generally, I agree you. In engineering orgs, it seems like the social dynamics of the org distribute who is perceived to be creating that value in a non-average way. e.g. the engineers improving reliability are probably perceived as less valuable than engineers putting out user visible changes. This seems to be what happens by default, unless leadership is self-aware enough to mitigate.

Attributing revenue to the short order cook is a lot easier than the engineer. (Sales people are also easier to quantify.)

No, you're forgetting the most important component of middle and senior management - the taking on of responsibility. We can all throw around anecdotes of CEOs that never pay for crimes, but in the operation of a company if you can keep the machine moving smoothly, the job is actually not very demanding on a daily basis.

The catch is that you're absolutely on the hook when things don't run smoothly in ways that individual contributors never are. How do you fix processes, people, and tools to resolve immediate problems and improve effectiveness of processes over the long term? How do you liaise effectively with senior management to affect change? How do you tell someone or a group of people that their job is being eliminated? Those aren't frequent tasks, but when they happen they are highly demanding. In management you need to soak up responsibility like a sponge - for a good operations manager, their idle time isn't a function of being lazy, it's a function of having paid it forward in process design while ironically amassing liabilities each day for when shit hits the fan.

CEOs have to fuck up pretty bad to be in a worse position after getting fired than a burger flipper who also just got fired. They really aren't on the hook for much.

That’s why I tried to point out that my comment wasn’t about the typical anecdotal CEO.

Nope. A typical manager will simply blame somebody else when things go wrong, and take all the credit when things go right. You are right that good managers take responsibility. But good managers are rare to find.

What can I tell you? You work around bad managers, not “typical” managers, IME. The typical productive ops middle manager is a pretty stressed out animal or left on the side of the road, the typical senior ops manager has an easier daily life punctuated by episodes of challenging and rewarding hardships. Good managers _are_ hard to find relative to good individual contributors. On that we agree. Most individual contributors who think they want to be managers quickly find out it’s not an easy or fake job - it’s a damn hard job to do correctly. Bad managers beget bad junior managers, but that’s rarely sustainable in the long term for an organization, again IME.

All software devs should work in QA for a bit to understand that in a real sense.

Or: don’t have QA at all and make sure devs speak to the user

this is an excellent exercise in empathy, plus you get more useful developers

Same, as I've been paid more and given more responsibilities, the more allowances have been given to me wrt how my work gets done, and a greater emphasis is placed on my comfort particularly over the long term. The way I've ended up modeling it is as power relationships. The same power relationship that lets an employer get away with paying someone minimum wage or close to it, also lets them figuratively crack the whip and literally destroy the bodies of these workers over the period they work. That power relationship is a much more predictive model IMO than value of work done if you have to pick one model (although economics is always an amalgamation of models in the real life and picking just one model to describe every situation is always a mistake).

Literally the hardest worker I've ever worked with was working for under minimum wage (Georgia at that time refused to enforce the federal minimum wage) until his boss lied to .gov to get that worker's refugee status revoked (saying to us later "you should thank me for getting rid of another mexican taking your jobs"). I think that worker is now in a prison in a Central American country (I want to say El Salvador?) on trumped up political charges that he was escaping. It's hard to get a better lesson that simply hard work is not enough to succeed in America.

This matches my experience as well. "hard work" isn't just the hours: it's also the mental and physical toll. White collar grinding is easy by comparison.

> It makes me wonder about these people who went to college, then straight into a six figure job out of college claiming to understand how the world works.

This is a very small percentage of people, and also a very small percentage of college graduates [1].

And even then many of those would have subsisted on a shoestring while in college.

1. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/average-sala...

I often have to remind myself about these stats after reading several comment threads on HN

And yet i seem to run into them again and again in this industry. And FAANG has hiring pipelines designed to grab these people.

Also i kind of doubt the schools that FANG hires straight of have student populations that have the same definition of shoestring budget as a normal person.

> And yet i seem to run into them again and again in this industry.

Well, for one thing, Your anecdotal encounters cannot possibly represent most college graduates.

Furthermore, most college graduates do not work in this industry, much less at FAANG companies.

I am glad to know that I am not the only person who felt this way - I have experienced similar.

There's hard work and then there's hard work.

There's work that's hard on your body, but is simple to do.

Then there's work that's easy on your body, but is difficult to do.

(Also, easy on the body/simple, and hard on your body and difficult, but in this case, they're not relevant)

Running cable, carting machines, and all the other stuff done by the bottom tier of IT is stuff more people are capable of doing. It's simpler. Designing the network, the software, etc is more difficult, not everyone can do it.

And those people who went to college then straight into a six figure job do know how the world works. Or at least a part of it. Because that's how it worked for them. It did work. They were not wrong.

They don't know how every part of the world works, though. And neither does the person who makes 30k a year in major American cities. They know how that part works.

Logically speaking then the person who did the 30k dance and then went to school and got a job making 6 plus figures know more than either of those groups?

And there's more than two experiences in this world.

Not to mention, the person who did one then the other knew what it was like to do "the 30k dance" then which could be very different than doing it today.

I believe this misses the point, as does the article. The "American Dream" was never about blindly working harder on the same things in order to achieve a state where you no longer have to work.

The dream is that through bettering yourself (education, skills), applying yourself to the myriad opportunities in our society (Business, religious, NGO, etc), you can find a niche in which you excel and create a better standard of living for yourself and your children.

Fussell calls this out in his Class. A marker of his lower- and mid-Prole and, to some extent, his Middle, classes, are that they're far more highly-surveilled and have much higher expectations for hard work and being on time and things like that than his Upper-Middle (and certainly his Upper).

Lower- and Mid-Prole: piss tests; written up for being five minutes late because there was a car wreck blocking traffic; doctor's note(!) required for a sick day; one week(!) of paid vacation per year.

Upper-middle: Microdosing or just, you know, straight up using illegal drugs with some frequency, possibly openly; "Car broke down, I'm just going to work from home (or take the day off, depending on how upper-middle we're talking) since I can't be in until noon, now, anyway"; "Mental health" days (that may be more "middle", actually—upper-middle may not have any need for the equivocation to placate others, nor ego-driven need to excuse not feeling like working with something quasi-medical); "I think I'll take my sabbatical this year".

(I'd say programmers mostly aren't, class-wise, upper-middle in Fussell's system, purely—they're a broad mix of upper-prole, middle [lots of middle], and upper-middle, according to the class privileges they enjoy and the norms that tend to be instilled in or brought to the table by programmers, and the mix of those varies a lot by industry and region)

Hard seconding Fussell's Class. Some of the specifics around signaling have changed in the past few decades since it was written (a lot being more the whims of fashion trends than anything else), but if anything the societal bands outlined have more clearly striated since then.

I'd love something more recent that treated the same subject anywhere close to as well. The near-contemporary and somewhat-related The Official Preppy Handbook received a sequel some years ago, but it's lazy crap with none of the insight or wry humor of the original. Awful little scrap-book that got published based on the reputation (and sales figures, I'm sure) of the original. Very disappointing.

I think the core discrepancy between people's experiences and beliefs on this subject is the meaning of 'hard' in 'work hard'.

If you take that to mean 'applying effort' then even in the most ideal meritocracy that would decouple from success, because where the effort goes matters.

I think the big difference in perspective between the kids who popped out of school at 6 figures and the people who spent a few years slaving away at 30k a year, is the assumption of maximally directing one's effort.

People who make 30k a year have likely made many attempts to direct their effort productively, and gotten little return. Kids who pop out of college making plenty of money, have likely made very few attempts to productively direct their effort, but have had enormous return.

I think this causes a difference in the perceived difficulty of accessing a productive outlet for effort. The prior assumes access is hard, meaning most effort is likely to be wasted, while the latter assumes access is easy, meany most effort ends up being productive to one's own success.

100% agree, my non-tech jobs I worked were horrible, I had a manager scream in my face and throw stuff onto the floor for a messy shelf(retail job I worked at a bit before college). I then worked at a lower level IT job where the the manager called all the workers sh!theads and then insulted us further while we were all in a meeting.

Contrast that with having coworkers now(work at a FANG equivalent) who went straight from prep school to ivy league(or stanford etc) and who have no comprehension of how a vast majority of the country deals with jobs or bosses, they think catered lunches/breakfasts are the norm and free massages are at all jobs.

IANAL, but habitually screaming at and insulting employees sounds like textbook harassment/bullying. I suppose this sort of criminality is less likely to be reported in more precarious employment situations.

As a data point, I have worked a lot of (so-called) blue collar jobs over the years, from stacking shelves to washing pots to serving drinks to digging ditches, and I never had a problem with a bully or a disrespectful boss. I have now been working as a software engineer for 10 years and one of my more recent bosses refused to call me by my name for several months and instead referred to me as "dickhead" or "you Irish bastard" and was known to jab his finger in people's faces and yell "fuck you" when he lost his temper. Assholes are assholes, no matter what your job title.

(but I certainly agree that lower-paid jobs are a lot tougher; even if the wages were the same, I wouldn't go back to any of the jobs I did before software)

I think retail encourages this type of behavior by having large numbers of unskilled workers all fighting for the small amount of decent paying positions, and then topping that off with paper thin profit margins due to business decisions made up higher, this leads to abusive managers floating to the top (of store management, district and regional management) as fear is a good way to get the troops inline and carry out the home offices orders. In addition job prospects of a retail front line worker are usually slim.

> Hard work is often touted as the key American virtue that leads to success and opportunity. And there’s lots of evidence to suggest that workers buy into the belief: For example, a recent study found that Americans work 25 percent more hours than Europeans, and that U.S. workers tend to take fewer vacation days and retire later in life. But for many, simply working hard doesn’t actually lead to a better life.

I’d argue quite strongly that working more hours, taking less vacation, and retiring later is the definition of a worse life.

This depends, if an individual sacrifices more in the short-term to achieve better long-term outcomes as defined by themselves then it can be quite positive.

The problem is when short-term sacrifice is simply short term sacrifice or will likely result in reduced expectations for the future.

I’d argue that “retiring later” precludes any argument for short term loss for long term gains. Generally retiring earlier is the long term gain that you take short term losses for, retiring is a sign that things haven’t gone as well as planned.

It depends, as an individual I'd prefer it if I didn't have to retire however I'd also prefer it if I didn't need to work.

Retiring later could be a sign of longer health ( although I doubt that's the reality in this statistic ).

> Retiring later could be a sign of longer health

It's a sign that you didn't manage to save enough in time. Soon retirement age will be over 70 pretty much everywhere in the west, nobody chose to work at that age for fun and giggles

Sadly, US lifespans are actually shrinking too. So we’re retiring later and dying earlier, which is less than ideal.

> success and opportunity.

Doesn't mean less stress. 21 vs 15.1 trillion. nearly double the GDP per capita.

> And there’s lots of evidence to suggest that workers buy into the belief

This doesn't follow from [edit] the examples. It may be that most Americans don't believe the common story around hard work leading to success and opportunity, but do believe that if they don't work hard (or appear to, e.g. not take vacation) they will be punished; long hours etc. may just be table stakes in the US.

That quote is from the article...

Apologies, "your examples" should be "the examples", edited.

Americans are also wealthier in general though, their houses are larger, they can afford better vacations and so on...

I think a lot of Americans don't realise just how much higher salaries are in the USA.

I guess the grass is always greener.

I'm not sure that perception is completely accurate though

a lot of things in the US are larger (including unfortunately the people itself), however that's not necessarily an indicator of a better quality of life.

The large houses and cars in particular have quite adverse social impacts. Low density living increases commute times, infrastructure cost, cost of housing, energy usage, and so forth. It's quite astonishing that the co2 emissions per capita in the US are almost three times as high as in the United Kingdom.

Our lives here in the US certainly aren't 3x better than the UK, and for a large chunk of our country they would have a better life in the UK due to the NHS.

TBH British homes do not need as much heating/cooling due to the local climate, plus the density of population in Southeast England is crazy and commute times high as well. I wouldn't like to live in such an anthill.

Our houses usually being tiny and connected to two other ones helps on the heating bills; its a shared effort.

Cooling is opening the window; turning on a fan and sweating your nads off. But only for a few weeks a year.

The rest of the year the incessant drizzle and grey sky helps cool the building.

I am from India and I have lived in UK and USA. Personally I think it is pretty stupid to compare USA and UK. I would rather be a janitor in USA than an engineer in UK. This is not a criticism of UK or its people in any way but USA is far far better country than UK.

It is not just that salaries are higher but overall quality of life is significantly better. In USA I can drive in any random direction for 400 miles and crash at a Motel 6 without having to worry about reservations. I can eat at Denny's at any time of the day and fill up gas in towns like Austin, NV with population 29. There are giant theme parks within 100 miles of driving distance in any city. USA is dotted with national parks and various state parks, fishing spots, hiking trails, hunting grounds. Every American school is basically a mini Olympic stadium with some space for classrooms. Most people including people below poverty line own cars, which means their quality of life is way better. You can explore different and remote places, spend more time with family and friends over the weekends and show your kids lot more stuff each weekend that what a London resident can not do for similar amount of money.

Also, I can totally see why people in UK may not want to make those extra bucks putting in more hours because often, it is not allowed because of tighter regulations. Tough labor laws discourage businesses from hiring new people so if you quit your job it is harder for you to find a new job. So people would rather stick to a dead end job working uninspired. that quit for better opportunities.

It is also incredibly common for Americans to simply quit their jobs and take a long break to explore whatever hell they want to explore. I arely saw that in UK.

You're assuming you can keep what you already earned and then become a janitor, which is different from starting as a janitor

I made no such assumption. When I moved to USA from India I would have happily moved in as Janiter. Life in USA as a janiter is way way better than a middle class person in India.

Your commentary convinces me completely that the US is a better fit for you than the UK was.

Mostly it convinces me that they've never been a janitor in the US.

Minimum wage work in the US is brutal. The federal minimum wage is $7.25, amounting to $14,500 a year if you can manage to work a steady job. That leaves you very little money left over for traveling to those national parks.

Being a janitor is actually a step up from a lot of retail jobs, where your schedule is variable and it's hard to work the same 40 hours per week. It might even come with health care, another thing rare among minimum wage jobs. It's less likely to come with retirement savings, and at $14.5k per year you're not putting anything away. Certainly not if you also like to take vacations.

Being poor in the US sucks. Being janitor is not the worst job, but from context I think they meant it that way. I think few people would take janitor in the US over engineer in the UK, and practically nobody sane would take jobs in retail or food service if they had any other option. (Part of the reason they pay so badly is that those are the jobs occupied by people who have no other option.)

Janitor is a pretty broad range of work but a professional full-time janitor is not a minimum wage job and could make $70k to $80k at an entry level.

Citing the federal minimum wage is kind of useless with the number of states and cities with their own laws.

I've been a janitor in the US.

I'll agree with his comment

Living in a double wide in BFE and commuting 40min of scenic roads to vacuum the regional hospital isn't that bad (I've done it). The instantanteos QoL was arguably better than my first tech job after I got my degree (but the tech job had better long term QoL because of savings and future earning potential).

That said, I'm surprised that more people working min-wage jobs while living in the high cost of living major metro area don't go postal. It's a far, far, far worse quality of life.

>Being a janitor is actually a step up from a lot of retail jobs,

It's really a matter of personal preference. All minimum wage jobs that aren't a good fit for any person suck. When you find something that's a good fit it's just a job. I hate customers so janitor was a way better fit for me.

I have not worked as a janitor but I have done menial work far worse than mopping a floor for assured hourly rate.

Being poor sucks everywhere but it sucks less in USA.

My claim is not that being janitor is some kind of gold standard or aspiration in USA. My point is that even such a very low skilled job is good enough to help you survive. You will probably suffer a lot but yet it is way way better than being completely jobless on streets.

Janitor is also not a job for life, it is mostly a stepping stone for something bigger and a lot A LOT of americans do this every single year. Something you will rarely see outside of USA.

I am afraid we are often expected to work crazy hours here as well.

The contract (we have employment contracts) may say 37.5 hours but it also says "and any other necessary to complete your work"

I think what you are getting at is its better to be rich in the US than the UK, in that I can agree with you on.

And what there requires you to be rich?

I don't understand why this is downvoted so much? A janitor has a wide spectrum of pay in the US and what he describes is certainly possible.

People also forget how good the standard of living can be for tradesmen charging $100-500/hr to reset a GFCI outlet or perform basic plumbing tasks in the US.

This mythical tradesman I describe often lives in a 1500+ sq-ft house and drives a pickup. He takes his kids dirt biking every weekend or goes fishing in his boat. The folks I met in the Google London office have none of these things. Most of them didn't even own a car and had a long public-trans commute home.

The bottom is really hard in the US, but the middle can be fairly good if you are working in the right areas of in-demand employment.

> Americans are also wealthier in general though

Americans are higher variance (wrt wealth) in general, which makes some of these comparisons quite difficult.

but median measurements exist

> but median measurements exist

Sure, but that's hardly a panacea. There are better and worse analysis, but this stuff is genuinely not easy to do well. No simple statistic alone will do it if you are comparing quite different distributions.

The US is well below many European countries (and others) by median wealth, and well above the same ones by mean wealth; That doesn't paint a clear picture either.

>The US is well below many European countries (and others) by median wealth

The US ranks 6 in median household income and median per capital income. The ones above us are much smaller nations, and it's easier to for them be statistical outliers compared to a large nation like the US. California, which has a larger population than any nation that scores better than the US in median income, blows any of them outside the water no matter what wealth metric you use.

Income and wealth are not the same thing.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

That would put US at 3 by mean and 22 by median. Countries above it by median would include UK, Japan, etc. Of course most countries are smaller by population, but that's not like comparing to Luxembourg.

I think we are agreeing, each one of this sort of comparison give you different information, which makes it difficult. Especially considering that, to your point, looking at Cali or Miss. gives a lot of variance by itself.

And aren’t helpful to individuals making decisions for themselves and their families. For an individual, the unemployment rate is either 0% or 100% (though gig workers and seasonal workers can be 50% employed exceptions)

Employment is far from a binary for an individual. Gig workers might work variable hours, and service workers might have multiple jobs held simultaneously. The idea that the employment rate is binary for an individual is overly reductive.

Houses are larger because we don't have a choice or the public policy to promote building modest, affordable housing anymore.

In fact, it’s illegal in a lot of places. Often the most desirable and expensive neighborhoods in modern cities would be illegal to construct now due to setback requirements, size, density zoning, and parking minimums. So instead of building more of the houses that people clearly want, we just bid them up in price until only the wealthiest can afford them.

how do those kind of non-optimal zoning laws get on the books?

They've been on the books since the early postwar era, when we didn't know any better. The question is: how do we get them off the books?

It’s hard to paint a coherent picture, because each of these regulations are put in place at different times for different reasons. The result is cumulative, but the motivations were fractured and complicated.

Humans have changed little over time. Zoning was the trendy new area of law in its day and was supposed to make cities and suburbs great. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

There is still plenty of affordable housing. You won't find it near SF, but move out to middle of nowhere and you will discover cheap houses and jobs. They won't pay as much, but when you can get a house for less than $100k how much do you need?

> when you can get a house for less than $100k how much do you need?

Well, enough to afford the mortgage and down payment for $100,000 worth of house for starters.

Sure, but if you are reading this that isn't hard. Even if stuck on minimum wage it is possible for a couple, not easy mind you, but possible.

Most of us reading this can afford to survive in expensive coastal cities; drawing conclusions about the affordability of middle American cities based on the experience of the top quintile is a very bad way to reason about these things. A much more fruitful way is to use actual numbers. So let’s do that.

The minimum down payment for most mortgages is 3.5%, which yields a mortgage payment of $635 at today’s rates, according to Zillow. This includes P&I, PMI, taxes, and insurance. So far so good.

The maximum recommended amount of your monthly take home your mortgage should be is 28%. If we follow this recommendation then our hypothetical family needs to bring home $2,267 after tax to guarantee that their mortgage is no more than 28% of their monthly budget.

$2,267 works out to $13.07 per hour for one person fully employed, or $6.53 for two people.

So yes, it’s technically possible at most minimum wages, but boy are those margins slim. I think the biggest issue here is that assuming that both members of the household can maintain perfect full time employment forever in an area where houses are that cheap is a really dangerous assumption to make.

The towns (a few different ones, all with MSA populations in the 500,000 range) I'm thinking of has fast food starting at $13.50/hour. With two incomes it isn't out of reach, and that is before you work up the chain, or find a better job - there are lots of other jobs hiring in the area for better pay (they are harder jobs to break into though). While the areas aren't the best, they are still safer than many larger cities.

Margins are slim for sure though. That point should not be overlooked. I am not trying to claim it is easy to live at the bottom.

They build all the modern houses with a smaller count of giant damn rooms than they built the older ones. And they don't think them through very well, so they're really inefficient with space. More hallways and fewer walk-through rooms, too, on top of lots of the rooms just having shitty, nonsense layouts. A 2,500 sqft typical suburban US house built after, IDK, 2005, may well not feel bigger than a 1,700 sqft house built with more rooms and more thought to how to best use the space. It'll look a lot better in real-estate photos, though! More wow-factor! Ugh.

> A 2,500 sqft typical suburban US house built after, IDK, 2005, may well not feel bigger than a 1,700 sqft house built with more rooms and more thought to how to best use the space.

It's too bad, because you can have tremendous wow factor in a smaller but very smartly designed space.

But indeed the cheapest form of wow factor is to supersize the house. This is cheap in design expenditure (AKA less "thought" in the design), but not cheap in in the amount of materials used.

In these cases lower quality materials - i.e. non-structural paper-based sheathing, flimsy weather barrier materials, etc - are often used to compensate for the huge size.

How much of it is an issue of policy versus being what the market wants? I don’t have a source for this, but my personal experience has shown that people buying houses prefer larger homes. Not to say everyone is looking for a 4,000 sqft house, but I haven’t met a person that isn’t excited by an extra room or a larger basement while house shopping. It feels like builders will continue to output houses that meet the desires of those that can afford these new homes.

Better vacations in my mind are either longer or often. Destination and amenities are not that important, I would gladly have more vacation even if I would stay in my city.

It all depends on the alternative. Being broke, living paycheck to paycheck, and no retirement savings also seems bad . I think a lot of young people these days , such as on Reddit and as part of the FIRE lifestyle, are putting in long hours so they can be able to retire early and have more time to enjoy life. Short-term pain for long-term gain.

The whole FIRE thing is a possibility for a very small portion of the population, in the top two, or maybe even just top income decile.

I think article conflate a lot of complex variables to come to conclusion that it wishes to draw.

It is not just dumb hard work that was regarded as American virtue. In fact Americans are quick to embrace technology to reduce workload, Americans rarely suffer from the luddite attitudes which are pretty common elsewhere in the world. As an immigrant, I think American virtues is about working hard for what you want rather than expecting someone else to do it for you. That notion of hard work is what American society values a lot even today. It is not just dumb work.

I come from India where people think Farmers are hard workers because they work in hot sun where as Tech workers are lazy because they spend all their time in AC offices. I do not see such attitudes in USA at all.

> a recent study found that Americans work 25 percent more hours than Europeans

That also leads to significantly more per capita income for Americans and far better quality of life and not that this is voluntary. Unlike Europe where jobs are mostly "protected" by tighter labour laws, exiting a job is much harder and getting a new job is even harder. USA does not suffer from such problems. I know plenty of people who simply quit their jobs and spend their time doing nothing for few months before getting a new job. No study would put this as "vacation" but in reality has same effect as vacation.

> that U.S. workers tend to take fewer vacation days and retire later in life

This is voluntary too.

> simply working hard doesn’t actually lead to a better life.

This is purely arbitrary conclusion that does not follow automatically from studies that are at best anecdotally.

> I’d argue quite strongly that working more hours, taking less vacation, and retiring later is the definition of a worse life.

May be but this is very very subjective decision and we can not make such conclusions on behalf of other people.

> I know plenty of people who simply quit their jobs and spend their time doing nothing for few months before getting a new job. No study would put this as "vacation" but in reality has same effect as vacation.

Hey, i did that too, for 6 month last year, and i still have 7 weeks of paid vacation/year. And i did go sailing every afternoon last week (this week its harder as the tides are in my work hours).

> And there’s lots of evidence to suggest that workers buy into the belief

it would be cool if people writing these pieces had a background in dialectical materialism. maybe people don't buy into the belief but are coerced into working more hours to *checks notes* not die?

I would have thought that basic economics would let you reason out that much, without even the need for advanced courses in diamat.

You’d think so, but based on the output of some economists it seems like this is not the case.

Working longer and less vacation isn't buying into that belief. Many are doing this because it's what's required to make a living. Work shuns vacation and you don't want to get canned regardless of how much you hate your job because you need the money and many places don't even have paid vacation so it hurts you to take time off.

I think we still have an outdated work ethic in America based on the Protestant work ethic, which I still fully subscribe to as a foundation for approaching work.

But the issues that arise from over-adherence with these ethics are that we tack on things like valuing formal education, and belief that a combination of education and hard work can take you places.

I think these are a proxy to pure objective success which is that the decisions you make and the opportunities available to you lead to what ends you may reap.

People see this mismatch all the time when they say things like, “Oh, but he or she is just so smart.” Or why we think it’s interesting that so many formally educated people work jobs that don’t match their level of textbooking.

None of that is purely relevant. You have opportunities available to you, you make choices based on those options, and new ones emerge.

But that’s not as easy to communicate or really as useful to people as working with these aforementioned proxies that we use today.

If you framed these discussions in the light of working towards efforts and end results that others want and can be capitalized on, I think you can get closer to what people are really looking for.

its nice to work hard and have a result that speaks for itself (imagine if you were on the team that pulled off the iphone) but i think the flip side of that is, most of us arent making an iphone, and often the fruits of that "hard work" disporportionally benefits those with the leverage and power

in other words, yes hard work is "paying off" but often its the person above or at the top (owner) that really reaps it, so then some people become jaded and start to reject that ethic

i think we also concentrate too much on the individual and not enough on the organizational/structural issues that prevent teams (and indviduals) from functioning well and moving upwards... those are harder to deal with and concentrating on ones own small chunk if the world is easier to grasp, but conversely the effect individuals can have from "just working hard" is extremely small in alot of cases

i guess its a combination... we should work hard but we should also make sure people actually benefit from that proportionally (fairly)... if not, something structurally is wrong...

In other words, workers are alienated from the products of their labor, and are aware that the surplus value (profit) of their labor is being taken from them but aren't able to stop it (individually).

(2017)

For anyone curious, it was discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078682

52 points by paulpauper on April 10, 2017 | 154 comments

Different article but more recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27514188

Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life (insidermag.net)

678 points by jason0597 7 days ago | 693 comments

When the SAT / ACT are thrown out and companies are no longer hiring based on merit, but other characteristics, is it any wonder that people would think that hard work doesn't matter?

These people are one step away from thinking about how to game the system and work smarter/ differently than just working hard.

But the SAT/ACT aren't thrown out. They are still widely used. And this phenomena is pretty sweeping and goes beyond jobs that require college (and therefor people who took or give a hoot about the ACT/SAT). The world does not turn on elite cultural panic.

> The world does not turn on elite cultural panic.

Hear hear! I feel it should be said as a bookend: elite media discourse _does_ turn on elite cultural panic.

> game the system

> SAT / ACT

It's pretty well established that the SAT / ACT are very straightforward to game. The existing system is gamed. It's not gamed towards intelligence or ingenuity, it's gamed towards hard work, which is mostly a proxy for time.

any better alternative?

If it can be gamed through hard work then why doesn't everyone who is willing to put it hard work get great scores?

Yes it does measure ability. Maybe hard work or practice helps some, I'm not excluding that.

> why doesn't everyone who is willing

Not everyone can afford to take it multiple times, do test prep courses, etc.

A good read: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2019/12/11/lawsuit-...

It doesn't make much of a difference. And not everyone can afford good organic food or private school. This isn't a good argument.

I got very high SAT scores, didn't work very hard at all, and rarely showed up to school. I sped through the last part to go do drugs with two of my friends.

I understand the moralism, but high SAT scores aren't work.

Ability counts, hard work isn't the end goal. The SAT is supposed to measure ability, because grades are a better measurement of hard work. The SAT is valued more highly than grades.

We have physical machines that could do the (physical)work of thousands of people, in a much more efficient way.

That is, a single person can lift, move, and manipulate tons.

Recently we have machines(computers, electronics, AI) that could do mental the work of thousands of people. In a much more efficient way. This is happening right now.

There are places in the world with incredible amounts of concentrated capital, like China (Shanghai,Shenzhen,HongKong), Silicon Valley, New York, Switzerland, Dubai and Singapore.

If you try to compete with those just putting more hours and exhausting your body in manual labor(and not using machine tools and capital like they do) you are on the losing track.

It worked for millions of years and is in our DNA. Like two males going to a fight for leadership (like has been done for millions of years) and one of them has a gun and kills the other with 0 effort a la Indiana Jones.

Doing more effort and working harder is what your DNA tells you to do.

I recommend that you write down a log of the quality and quantity of your work, just like Henry Ford did with his workers but with yourself. Work more hours and work less hours and log your output in specific things you did. Add things you like over your week like going mountain hiking, log your output, do nothing in the entire week that you like (sacrifice) and log it.

You will be surprised by what you learn about yourself.

Titles like this in the media are harmful.

A title such as "Americans Are Pretty Skeptical That Hard Work Will Pay Off" implies ALL Americans.

A title such as "Some Americans Are Pretty Skeptical That Hard Work Will Pay Off" is more accurate, as the article states "74% of those surveyed" and I don't know the audience for sure.

We need to stop making blanket statements like this and be more factual.

And a title such as "Americans Are Pretty Skeptical That Hard Work Will Pay Off

Given the state of the housing market in most cities it seems our hard work does pay off... for our landlords.

~70% of Americans own a home. Don't blame us because you choose to live in a dense urban area where you can't afford to buy a home. Until recently(2010-2020) buying a home was on avg. cheaper than renting.

...so anyone who's under the age of 35 is just screwed? That's what you're effectively saying.

I'm under 35 and own a home. 42 percent of millennials own homes.

I don’t believe it’s that high anymore. And further, we have one of the lowest homeownership rates as compared to other developed nations the last time I saw these figures.

What do you think the home ownership rate is in America then?

It’s about in the low 60’s and projected to be in the high 50’s soon. It’s consistently dropping.

according to where? I can't find a single place that says less than 65.6% you think the huge increase of housing demand/sales is going to decrease homeownership rates? that demand is why prices are absurd right now.

Hmm, you’re right. I guess my information is out of date.

~65% and rising

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rat...

If "the poor" move to less dense areas then who will wait your tables, pick up your garbage, clean your offices, cook your food, check out your groceries, etc? Saying "just don't live here" is one of the most ignorant responses that always arises in these types of conversations.

As someone from the midwest, This argument doesn't work. Stop trying to live in same place as 13 million other people. life will be a lot cheaper. We need to decrease density. the avg rent in my state is $750 for a 2br-apt.

> most ignorant responses that always arises in these types of conversations

umm its the only REAL solution.

> If "the poor" move to less dense areas then who will wait your tables, pick up your garbage, clean your offices, cook your food, check out your groceries, etc?

That is not the reason people stay in HCOL areas. There is value for them there, or the cost to leave seems higher than staying.

I mean, it won't. The study with the most positive outcome that I was able to find still makes it look, on average, like a sucker's game. Working ~10% harder earns you a 1% raise.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669971

I suppose one mitigating factor is that the raises might compound, so that, after 20 or 30 years, the person who's working 50 hour weeks will still be stressed out, but they're at least more likely to be stressed out while on a boat.

Working harder is normally interpreted as laboring harder.

I view it as spending the energy in finding creative ways to make money that over time reduce the need for labor. It still counts as working hard because it takes a lot of effort to not just follow a predefined path

I think that’s regarded as “working smarter”

>For example, a recent study found that Americans work 25 percent more hours than Europeans, and that U.S. workers tend to take fewer vacation days and retire later in life. But for many, simply working hard doesn’t actually lead to a better life.

using "pure" hours is weird way of measuring "hard work"

In games like League of Legends there are players with like 6k hours and they stay around lowest ranks,

where they should be way higher, but that's just game, they may not care about rank or stuff

putting effort "blindly" is not optimal strategy

___________

who's doing more hard work -

person who sits at warehouse for 9h day

person who sits at warehouse for 8h day and then learns for 1h e.g programming/math/physics/whatever in his free time?

I'd say 2nd one is way harder

> using "pure" hours is weird way of measuring "hard work"

Americans work more but their productivity per unit of time is pretty low.

https://www.expertmarket.co.uk/crm-systems/the-ultimate-guid...

"The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progress is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of corporate abuse – the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters – has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment." - Chris Hedges

Previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27514188

I think part of the disillusionment is because Americans have been ingrained belief in free will, a statement often used by the rich to justify inequality, despite plenty of evidence supporting the contrary. https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...

“It's true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance”

—Ronald Reagan

People die from overwork all the time. In Japan they even have a word for it.

Amazingly, the results of the survey are a precise fit with SPARCC's stated mission [1].

I'm skeptical. Maybe if we saw some data about the survey I could be convinced. (Which questions were asked, the demographics of the responders, etc.)

[1] https://www.sparcchub.org/about/

As they live the life of the global 1%.

That very much depends on who you’re talking about. Top quintile of American society? Sure. Bottom quintile of American society? Definitely not. America is a pretty tough place to be poor in, and I think calling the working poor in America “the global 1%” is a pretty hard to defend statement.

>"To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. "

.... The median average salary for workers in the United States is $49,764 per year.

The median salary tells you nothing about impoverished Americans. 20th percentile household income in the USA in 2018 was $25k. Comparing incomes between countries as straightforwardly as this ignores differences in cost of living, too.

You aren't accounting for purchasing power. In most countries, medicine costs half as much (or less), education is much cheaper, and the cost of food and housing is much lower.

And in many of those countries expensive things like cars and smartphones are usually discretionary items, not absolutely or near-absolutely necessary to get and keep a job, pay taxes, get your children to school and so on.

> You aren't accounting for purchasing power.

Which is pretty easy to account for if one is being serious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

And Milanovic does so in his figures. It's "unserious" (and bizarre) to assume that an economist failed to make this adjustment, and then claim that it's super easy to do so; the latter statement should mean that your baseline assumption is that PPP adjustment was performed.

> You aren't accounting for purchasing power. In most countries, medicine costs half as much (or less), education is much cheaper, and the cost of food and housing is much lower.

Milanovic's figures do account for overall purchasing power. It would be pretty amateurish of an economist not to.

The distribution of the price level among verticals is a separate question though, and it's possible that it's suboptimally skewed in the US

What quintile do you think the median salary is in? Hint: it’s not the bottom one.

The bottom quintile of US households made anywhere between $0 and $25,600 in 2018, with the mean being $13,258. All of these numbers are well outside “global 1%” range you quoted.

And that’s before we begin to adjust for cost of living, because you can’t just compare income without considering the cost of food, housing, health care, and transit.

That's not possible. There are 7.5 bullion people in the world, so 1% is 75 million people. Ipso facto it's impossible for most people in the US to be the one percent because 170 million is more than 75 million.

I mean; stats wise, maybe. But many wage/costs are relative and proportional and not everybody in USA is equal.

I was born in a developing country and lived through a brutal civil war; and there are certainly millions of people in USA, working hard, but staying poor, whose quality of life is comparable in various categories in terms of suffering. You can fall through cracks in a very cracked system very easily. It's not like all 330mil Americans have it great.

> It's not like all 330mil Americans have it great.

But for the most part it’s pretty nice

How many of those 330mil would immigrate to a developing country with a brutal civil war?

You are right that the US is better than a “developing country with a brutal civil war”. That isn’t a very high bar though.

The United States has the highest Immigration rate in the world... aka the most desirable place to live in the world.

I feel that statement gets tricky.

Applicants vs approved, per population or absolute, documented vs undocumented, etc.

I imagine that a very large country with more liberal immigration policy will by default have more absolute immigrants than a small country with closed door policy - regardless of which one is more desirable to live.

Note further: "In 2019, with 11 percent of the United States’ population, Canada receives 32 percent of the number of legal immigrants that of the United States receives."

https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-multi-year-immigration-pla...

or finally Wikipedia, where USA isn't in the top 20 per-population immigration rate, no matter the source you check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...

Conclusion - that statement holds minimum to no liquid water

Those two statements are not necessarily correlated. The worse your neighbour countries are, the more eager people are to immigrate to any nearby country that is less bad. The US is definitely more desirable than Mexico. But that doesn’t prove that the US is more decidable than other non-developing countries. I was offered a green card and 6 digit salary to move to the US. I chose to move to Australia instead. That was a great move.

A wage slave is a wage slave, it doesn't matter if you have a tesla and a 75" oled TV if you're going to work all your life you're just as good as having a 20 years old Ford and a 32" tv.

what are you yipping about? Every economic system requires working.

Just saying that the "1%" doesn't matter much when it's based on bs metrics. Quality of life != how much you can consume

lol, Look at what most Americans complain about when it comes to Quality of life... Most of it is related to how much they can consume.

This is proof that being in the 1% doesn't mean shit in overall happiness if you're basing it on purely materialistic metrics. They're in the top 1% worldwide and still complain

Sure. Go ahead and tell the homeless or poor working Americans how lucky they are to live in a wealthy country. I am sure they will appreciate it.

See https://www.amazon.com/Aint-No-making-2nd-Second/dp/B002NAUW...

The phrase "inequality of opportunity" itself exacerbates the inequality. Saying that a group of people has not had equal access to the same opportunities as other groups is going to put that first group at a further disadvantage, particularly when looking for jobs or applying to schools.

Let's run a decade long experiment where we eliminate school rankings and make it illegal for students and alumni to mention to anyone at anytime which schools they attended.

Indeed I’ve given up on this idea for my own life - my own hard work has yielded basically nothing.

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