Comment by temphn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temphn | Hacker News Reader

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I'd like a calm discussion, if possible.

> The people who work the hardest (e.g. single mother, people with 2 and 3 jobs) are not getting ahead as fast people who don't work as hard.

Sure. But I think this comes back to relative vs. absolute.

You aren't disagreeing that if an individual works more hours at any given job[1], all else equal, they will make more money.

I'm not disagreeing that there are individuals with different hourly pay rates.

Where we might disagree is whether there is a genuine positive correlation between skill level/scarcity of skill and hourly wage rate.

Also, I might have close to $0 in my bank account, but I don't really care that there are rich people out there and am not envious of them. It's enough for me that as I work harder, I will see the returns of my personal effort.

If instead one is really concerned about other people, then you've set yourself up for discontent, no matter how hard you work! I can practice basketball all day long and work hard, but I will never glide to the hoop as effortlessly as LeBron. And most people can practice programming all day long but will never be capable of doing the work at Facebook or Google.

It's important to know one's strengths and limitations. Go for the best hourly wage you can get, by all means, but that won't necessarily be $500/hour. And sure, there will be someone out there who can command that wage and make it look easy. You can focus on the cosmic injustice of this and make yourself unhappy, or you can do what you can to make your own life better.

> The economy isn't some lab experiment with double blind testing and so on. Any data you think you have is going to have some major fundamental flaws.

Well, if you believe this premise then it's not possible to submit evidence supporting any position, either mine or yours. I do believe there is some objective truth out there.

[1] Yes, salaried jobs don't have this characteristic directly, but only indirectly in the sense of getting a bonus or promotion. But those are also pretty good jobs relative to hourly jobs, which takes us back to square 1.

>I'd like a calm discussion, if possible.

You're both implying that poor people are lazy and confusing economics for a hard science. The latter is annoying but the former is offensive.

>You aren't disagreeing that if an individual works more hours at any given job[1], all else equal, they will make more money.

Actually I absolutely disagree that working more hours at a job gives more money. I've been a career software developer for 12 years now and for me it is the exact opposite. The more I work, the less I make. I don't claim that working less means more money but rather that any correlation between the two is largely coincidental. The hardest working white collar workers I ever knew worked at the Walmart home office. They were (and still are) also the worst paid I've ever worked with.

By what mechanism would a salaried worker make more by working more? In my experience they either work more because the position requires it (i.e. it's expectation and you don't get performance raises for meeting expectations) or they are under the mis-impression that this will get them ahead. Usually in the latter case, several people get this silly idea and start competing with each other pushing team average working hours up and thereby making each other mediocre again. You can't give one guy a raise for working 12 hour days when the whole team is doing it.

From everything I've ever seen in my career; networking gets you ahead, not number of hours your butt is in a seat nor gallons of sweat you perspire. If anything, these two things get in the way of networking.

>Also, I might have close to $0 in my bank account, but I don't really care that there are rich people out there and am not envious of them. It's enough for me that as I work harder, I will see the returns of my personal effort.

It doesn't bother you that since '79 middle/lower class wages (inflation adjusted) have remained relatively flat while the top tear have around 4 times more wealth? [1] People who got rich by making their own business didn't hurt you, true, but that is a vanishingly small percentage of the wealthy. The CEO's are making megabucks and laying you off instead of passing on part those profits to you (the worker). As a workforce we've gotten vastly more efficient but most of the fruits of those labors are going to upper management.

>If instead one is really concerned about other people, then you've set yourself up for discontent, no matter how hard you work!

A good sentiment overall, but in this case not quite true. Politics got us in this mess and good politics could get us out again. Either that or if most of the workforce would just stop working for BigCorp Inc. and start their own small businesses, make a big Coop, whatever.

>You can focus on the cosmic injustice of this and make yourself unhappy, or you can do what you can to make your own life better.

You seem to have turned into an infomercial, but this touches on the whole point: what you can do to make your life better is not working harder. There are a lot of things you can do, but hard work will have the lowest (if any) yield. Networking will have the biggest effect if you're both lucky and good.

>Well, if you believe this premise then it's not possible to submit evidence supporting any position, either mine or yours.

I believe because it's not only true, it's obvious. That doesn't mean we can't support positions it just means you can't come out and say "see, it's the poor people's own fault, here's the proof". There is no "proof". There is only faulty data and antidotes to build assumptions on.

>I do believe there is some objective truth out there.

There are experiences of real people. Claiming something like "salaries go up with hours worked" just can't be proven conclusively any more than the weather man can tell you how much rain you will get on Tuesday, 3 months from now.

[1] http://tucsoncitizen.com/medicare/2011/02/24/the-rich-get-ri...

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