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Comment by sjtindell | Hacker News Reader

I sit upon a silk cushion, my servants fanning me as I pluck a grape from the bowl. “The plebs don’t understand how hard I work too”, I complain to no one in particular. “Don’t they realize a union will only hurt them? If they’d just brought me their concerns, I’m sure I would have changed those policies.” My guards chuckle as they spear a nearby peasant and toss him from the ramparts.

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Is this seriously supposed to be anything but hyperbole? It's not a question of how hard a given job is, but how much demand there is for a given job. If someone wants this job and wants it so much that they're willing to do it for less, I'm not saying no. Not unless there's some special skill that these existing QA people have that the rest of the labor pool lacks.

If someone else is capable of doing my job for half the pay, then hats off to them, and they deserve it.

That's certainly one theory on how to price labor, but it's not the only one (and not even the only one in our capitalist economy.) Worker coops, for instance, have a totally different theory of labor value.

So no, it's not hyperbole to suggest the poster is undervaluing their peers.

Not just "undervaluing their peers" but comparing them to peasants murdered and put on pikes?

Honestly the tone of the post and the satirical post matched each other so precisely I think it serves as a useful counterpoint to what was posted. The continuity in tone with a completely different context sheds a new light on how problematic the content of the original post was. This is essentially what satire is for.

This made my morning, thank you.

Personally I cannot wait for these “engineers” to be treated like normal technicians.

The odd sense of superiority that people like OP seem to have is nauseating.

FWIW, I am an engineer and I agree with you.

So am I. I have interviewed a lot of “software engineers” lately and I think that our industry needs to do a better job of protecting that title.

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