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Comment by julianlam | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice line of thinking, sure—that you can achieve happiness and contentment without having to strive for the "best".

That's the whole point of the matter though, isn't it, that if you don't have ambition, then you voluntarily get yourself stuck in a rut of your making. "I'm content in that my life is shitty in X or Y way, but cannot do anything about it".

There was a time when I found comfort in thinking that I would grow up to be "comfortably middle class". My parents disabused me of that notion, and now that I am at that stage, I feel as though there is so much more I can learn and do, instead of clocking in and out day after day.

But hey, if you find happiness in working at a gas station or something, maybe you are more enlightened than I am.

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I don’t understand the thought process of putting someone down based on what they do for a living. Particularly when it just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The world around you revolves around people that clock in and out day after day. Maybe one day we’ll have 7.5 billion CEOs in the world, huh?

> I don’t understand the thought process of putting someone down based on what they do for a living

Discounting the counter productive condescension required to be the one putting the other guy down, we should all be honest with a simple fact: any typical software dev (just talking about what I know) can succeed at a gas station job while the reverse is not true. This obviously does not afford the software dev the right to be a jerk to anybody (up or down the ladder).

Many, perhaps most, software devs, would utterly fail at a job that had customers, regular hours, physical labor, etc.

I worked in grocery stores with people that I would argue are smarter than many of the devs I have worked with. My old manager when I was younger and working in a grocery store was on a path to be a medical doctor, but changed paths after his friend killed himself from the the stress of medical school.

Intelligence is only one of the many variables needed to succeed in certain occupations.

It's absolutely perplexing to me that people seem to think that it's blindly OK to generalize purely anecdotal data as absolute objective truth.

Although you have zero supporting evidence for this fatuous assertion, you're perfectly fine with passing it off as empirical data. If you actually took the time to speak to your average software dev particularly in America, you would find that it's more likely that they've worked customer facing retail when they were younger. These are pretty much the only types of jobs that are available during high school. I myself have worked at Walmart, Blockbuster video, Chick-fil-A, and as a landscaper during the summers. None of it was particularly taxing - although it was extremely tedious at times and often boring.

And while we're on the subject of anecdotal data I would say on the order of at least 60 to 70% of software devs that I've worked with in the past were actually in relatively good shape physically and usually were very conscientious about their diet and maintaining regular exercise.

We really need to be filtering people back to Reddit.

I would pay very good money to watch you spend a Valentine’s Day working at a restaurant.

I know I couldn’t do it. I’m good when it comes to tech stuff because it clicks with my brain and I enjoy it. I’ve worked these sorta jobs before. I did a bit of construction for a summer, and I worked a catering job for a few years. Chicago’s summer heat, humid, standing in front of an open flame for 6-12 hours—absolutely not. I came home utterly destroyed. The person I worked for absolutely loves it, though. He’s self-employed, works only on the weekends, is immensely proud of the food he cooks, and has been doing it for decades. Great guy to work for. If you wanna get paid cash and you love cooking, that’s a great job. I would absolutely never ever look down on someone that’s putting in work like that. Me personally, I’m not physically or mentally equipped for that sorta work long-term. And that’s fine.

Completely agree about not putting people down.

But I do think the world is a better place with more "CEOs" running independent taco joints, and less Tacobells.

And these independent taco joints would be staffed by...?

AI/ML, AR/VR, IoT, blockchain, microservices, data science, API, of course.

The CEO him/herself, and some employees who are working for cool boss with their hands on the tools, instead of some suit from Tacobell.

Nothing wrong with working for someone, that wasn't my claim.

"I'm content in that my life is shitty in X or Y way, but cannot do anything about it".

What is “shitty” in this context?

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