Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Without commenting on the bulk of the article, the opener is a good reminder for this audience: something like 96% of employed people are not in the high tech industry. Our personal mental context for employment is emphatically not typical.

I mainly share this observation because in my experience, us tech types (probably like all humans) have a propensity to subconsciously assume everyone experiences existence in about the same way as we do.

View on HN

That and the fact that reported "10k layoffs at tech company" doesn't mean 10k developers, sysadmins, and the like are now out of a job. It generally is a mixture of all roles at the company – many of which may not be "techy" in nature (customer service reps, etc.)

Not that anyone losing a job is ever a good thing, but I think a lot of news stories make it seem like a mass-extinction of fullstack devs, when the reality is more complex.

Now I'm distracted by the guaranteed-to-be-frustrating question of how they delineate what industry someone works in. I'm going to guess that if you do any job at a tech company, you're in the "Information" bucket. But I bet if you work at a contractor that services a company, you could suddenly be in another service bucket.

> the high tech industry

I know you didn't mean it this way, but my morning brain read "high tech industry" as a "high elf vs regular elf" thing and it made it sound pretty funny. I could totally see some sector of tech considering itself the "high tech industry".

> I could totally see some sector of tech considering itself the "high tech industry".

I mean... a good chunk of Silicon Valley does live in a fantasy world. ;)

My new title shall be Technomage.

Sounds good! Just one friendly piece of advice if you don't mind: do not be fooled by one's own intuition. Technomages need high charisma more than they need intelligence or wisdom.

(I wrote this joke and then realized that it's actually probably kind of true...)

Nah, techno SORCERERS need high CHA. Mages and Wizards use INT. Priests use WIS (something something coding holy wars).

Now I'm surprised that I haven't seen a weed startup marketing itself as "High tech"

I chuckled when I saw the Twitter bio for the item in the lede. Yes, reporter person, you are in an echo chamber, and it means that you're probably failing at your job (charitably assuming that Insider has higher aspirations than serving as a tech gossip rag).

“I mainly share this observation because in my experience, us tech types (probably like all humans) have a propensity to subconsciously assume everyone experiences existence in about the same way as we do.”

Smartest sentence I’ve read on this site.

not everyone comes home and grinds LC mediums on a weekly basis?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com