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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Default work culture and job expectations are basically designed around the idea that you are hiring a married man whose wife is cooking, cleaning etc and all he has to do is his paid job. This is simply not reality in most cases.

Also, while only 15 to 20 percent of people qualify as officially disabled, studies suggest that at least 60 percent of people have some degree of impairment that would benefit from accommodation.

I suspect the above two factors are the root cause of seemingly nice people who are seemingly resistant to change and just can't get their act together.

These days, even just getting oneself adequately fed without excess time and expense seems to be a challenge for a large number of people. We have a variety of services trying to address that issue but, really, it probably needs something more like a cultural shift to address it effectively.

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So our entire society has become disabled, and the answer is to accommodate (read: pay for) everyone's inability to meet standard expectations of a full time role? It seems to me that the emphasis on accommodating people, avoiding negative emotion, stressful situations, and difficult conversation is what's causing people to grow into adulthood incapable of basic functioning.

People need hardship in order to become conditioned to life. Depriving them of it does no one any favours. Ask your grandparents how they lived when they were in their 20s - what they ate, how convenient their lives were, how accommodated they felt by their employers. The answer here is less accommodation, not more. Sink or swim. Most people, when faced with the choice of hard work or real destitution, will choose hard work. This is the cultural shift you're looking for.

My grandparents had church, social clubs, mutual aid organizations, and unions which all helped (paid for) support of one kind or another during their hardships.

Working together and accommodating others is probably one of the strengths we’ve actually failed to foster in the contemporary context, to our detriment. The atomization of the individual and the cult of silent suffering is something they’d balk or pity us for.

I'm not so sure. Everyone I've met born before 1950 would much rather suffer in dignified silence than burden anyone with their care.

My grandparents were dustbowl survivors and veterans who humbly attribute their survival and later success to their neighbors, friends, and colleagues that helped them, and whom they spent their later lives trying to pay back in kindness and friendship.

The influence of our relationships, and who we know, on our worldview is certainly fascinating.

Aye, neighbours, friends and colleagues are exactly who we should be building relationships with and relying on. No additional intervention required from governments via employers.

They counted their friends and colleagues among their employers, actually. And the government’s GI Bill and veterans’ administration’s work placement and employee advocacy programs were among their most cherished programs.

Yep, we owe a debt to veterans for putting their lives on the line in defence of our values (especially WWII vets). We don't owe the same debt to everyone else though do we? It's in fact everyone else who owes the veterans.

Also, there's nothing stopping anyone today from making friends with their colleagues and employers, and relying on those relationships in times of need. I'm still not seeing why we need an intervention.

People simply do better when they work together and try to make each others’ lives better.

Your points seem to be meandering and I’m content where we’ve come in this conversation. Be well!

Average life expectancy in 1920s America was 54 years.

https://www.ncpedia.org/history/20th-Century/1920s#:~:text=I....

It is now 78.9 years.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-....

We can deal with the reality that a lot of people are alive today who cannot work long and hard yet still need to support themselves.

Or we can continue to whine about how the world is broken and unfixable and talk about UBI -- aka a universal dole -- as our imagined solution while not actually implementing it, I guess.

Your life expectancy figure is misleading. Life expectancy at birth was low due to high infant mortality. Life expectancy at age 15 was in the high 60s in 1933[1].

Your initial post referenced ~60% of people are impaired to the degree that they need explicit accommodation. They can't all be over 60, the demographics just don't work.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-15...

The reality is that a lot of privileged people get the accommodations they need, they just don't blame it on personal impairment. People in the C-suite routinely have personal assistants to help them keep their schedule on track, write their correspondence, etc.

They may be incapable of doing those tasks themselves but no one acts like they should. A lower level employee who has trouble spelling may be deemed incompetent. A higher level employee who can't spell gets automatic accommodation in the form of having their administrative assistant deal with their correspondence or check their writing if they write something themselves.

There were a lot of things different in the past compared to today. In the time of President Lincoln, average education level for adult women was second to fourth grade. At one time, it was fairly common for people working on farms and the like to stop attending school after 8th grade.

With an increasingly complex society, the expectations for "basic" competency at a lot of things is more demanding than it once was. This is not about feeling sorry for a few whiners. This a societal shift and we can figure out how to do this better or crash and burn.

You're suggesting that C-suite leadership attained their positions as a result of their privilege, not their competence. I disagree. It seems to me that our hierarchies are primarily of competence, not of privilege. You almost never see children of CEOs becoming successful CEOs. 70% of intergenerational wealth transfers fail. To become a successful leader (and have an executive assistant, etc.) you have to demonstrate extreme competence.

Companies provide executive assistants to the employees whose time they value most. I agree that our society is getting more complicated and demanding. I just disagree that it follows we should be forced to take the incapable along for the ride instead of just letting them abjectly fail. The bar is getting higher. That means the average person will have to be more capable to succeed. All of this is fine.

Re: executive assistants, I suspect LLMs will make the point moot within a decade.

"Accomodations" in this case could be something as simple as noise cancelling headphones for employees working in an open plan office. Or a woman wearing a sweater because the office is cold. We don't tend to think of these as a disability measure because the problems are obviously caused by the setup of the work environment.

Expecting people to suffer hardships and learn to work harder instead of using simple tools to improve their productivity is just bizarrely cruel.

People should buy sweaters and headphones for themselves then. Accommodation in this context references something an employer must explicitly provide for employees (usually by law). Are you suggesting that employers need to hand out headphones and sweaters?

OP referenced benefits from accommodations for employees who aren't recognized as disabled, so it seems pretty clear we're outside of the legal framework for workers with disabilities.

And, generally, they do buy those things for themselves. Though plenty of employers will allow employees to expense these sorts of things, along with tools like ergonomic keyboards. They're cheap, in comparison to the cost of employees.

Hell, maybe that's the example I should have led with. Some non-disabling health conditions might put someone at a heightened risk for carpal tunnel syndrome. Ergonomic tools seems like a no brainer, compared to hardship and learning to work harder.

The degree to which employers are willing to accommodate employees (with expendable benefits, etc.) is directly correlated with the expendability of said employees. If you're a 200k/yr programmer with a 60k cost to hire, you can expense whatever you want. If you're a 20k/yr cashier then you cannot. Are you suggesting this should change? If yes, can you elaborate as to why?

Accommodation in this context references something an employer must explicitly provide for employees (usually by law).

I said no such thing. Just making the observation that if people fail to change adequately to keep their job, there is probably an underlying reason.

I spoke of a need for cultural change in details like how we feed ourselves. You making this about an expectation that it is entirely on employers to cater to the needs of whiny, incompetent losers or something is just that: You framing it that way. I did not frame it that way.

For open plan offices? Sure. One of the reasons open plan offices are popular is because they offload costs like this to the staff. Maybe there needs to be a cash allowance for that kind of thing, as prefs for stuff like sweaters and headphones are pretty variable.

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