Comment by scaramanga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scaramanga | Hacker News Reader

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This is literally the logic of capitalism. Your value is simply whatever value you are able to negotiate for yourself on the job market. OP is more valuable than a toilet cleaner, or a starbucks barista, less valuable than a corporate lawyer or a CEO.

People naturally "compare up" rather than "compare down". Sure OP is probably in the 1% wealthiest people in the world, or top 99.9999% of those who ever lived, but rather than be happy with that, he will compare himself to other computer programmers who are doing fantastically, and feel bad about himself.

Another factor here is probably the fact that OP's working conditions are highly exploitative, it appears that he is putting in far more work than necessary. He probably genuinely believes that hard work is rewarded and doesn't understand why he feels used up and spent. And it's probably because he is being used up and spent by his exploitative employer. So fair enough if you look around and see other developers who are not being used up, you might decide you want to live life with a measure of dignity, too.

Any rational actor in this circumstance would do the minimum work they could get away with, and do whatever they can to negotiate for better conditions. A first step might be to develop enough self esteem to be able to say "no" when asked to work unhealthy and unproductively long hours. But without knowing more of the specifics of how much leverage he has, it's hard to know if that is going to be met with instant reprisal or whether he will be able to gain the respect he deserves.

Of course, I am starting from the basic assumption that all human beings are worthy of some basic amount of respect, dignity, and freedom from exploitation.

> OP is more valuable than a toilet cleaner, or a starbucks barista

Not to kill your point, but those two are dramatically under-valued and under-appreciated jobs in most societies around the world. Every time you use a toilet (other than the one in your home) which is hopefully clean, somebody had cleaned it recently. Imagine they hadn't. You'd have a terrible day. Every time you go grab a good Starbucks coffee. Maybe even sit down in a comfy sofa to be able to enjoy it. Imagine the barista had screwed it up.

Both experiences make a huge difference in people's lives. Hundreds if not thousands a day. Every day. But they are paid crap and talked about in the way you just did. Compare that to a coder churning away meaningless features in some meaningless app. Would I care if the coder wouldn't show up to work for the next 4 weeks with nobody stepping in their place? No. That answer is decisively different for the toilet cleaner and the barista.

> But they are paid crap

The pay is usually indicative of employer's ability to find a person with the necessary skillset to do the job and not some abstract "importance to society" value that the job has.

Wouldn't it be nice if pay was correlated with value to society? There are a lot of software engineers getting paid bank to make products that are worse for users and society but make their bosses fat stacks. The school janitor is providing more benefit to society.

As a software dev I agree, and I've worked on some products I'd deem as a net positive to society. But there is just so much shit software out there.

As a German I wonder what the people where thinking programming VWs TDI system to activate emission controls only during testing, was it worth it? Polluting the environment and peoples lungs for a bit of money? It's not like dev jobs are a rarity in Germany. And yes I'm judgemental about this. And don't get me started on the things that are legal and still a detriment to society.

What were the execs that put a bunch of monkeys in an exhaust gas chamber to prove it was “clean diesel” thinking? Or the ones who signed off on the “Green Police” ad?

I think what the parent is trying to say, is that if we really valued those things, they would be paid more. The thing is, cleaning toilets is pretty easy. I do it myself all the time at home. So is making coffee. It's not _the best_ coffee, but it's coffee. The baristas who make _the best_ coffee probably get paid quite a lot. But it's pretty easy to make okay coffee. For most people in this world, programming is hard. And even if you thing that feature of that app is meaningless, somebody else obviously disagrees with you and is willing to spend a lot of money to make that feature happen.

The value is not what we _think_ of it, but what we're willing to pay for it.

My take: payment is not based on created value, but on competition for the job. The more competition, the lower the salary an employer can get away with.

> My take: payment is not based on created value, but on competition for the job. The more competition, the lower the salary an employer can get away with.

And yet, for the past two years, just about every store you'll ever go to has a 'Sorry, we're shortstaffed' sign in the window.

If there's zero offerings/competition, the job can't be filled. If they increase salary, there would be competition.

I agree that our society's method for allocating value to people has fundamental flaws; chief among them is that money is the main measure of value.

Ben Franklin called money 'coined liberty'; in this day and age it is more 'coined status'. It is a scaling mechanism. Reputation only works if people know you, there are simply too many people to know, so we've replaced reputation with money.

However, in the context of this discussion thread, the word 'value' can be interpreted as "paycheck". Your and my diversions are that, diversions.

> Your value is simply whatever value you are able to negotiate for yourself on the job market.

Since what you can negotiate is in part related to what value you can actually provide, then what you can negotiate is ultimately guided by reality, if not determined by it. Of course negotiation matters. In business as well as in love. And it matters in part because we cannot read minds and cannot see everything that you can do. So communication must fill that gap. Imperfectly.

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