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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

Similar raising. At one point I was ASE certified, at another I was a landscaper.

The first thing I noticed about white collar work was how gossipy and lazy everyone was. We didn't have time for that in blue collar work. I had no idea how these people were useful to work or society.

It seems so bizarre to me, even today, that most white collar jobs make more money. It's like they took the people who couldn't work physically, made them feel superior, and for some reason paid them unreasonable wages.

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It's not really a secret that a lot of white collar jobs are bullshit jobs - if all blue collar jobs were to stop working, society would collapse overnight. Not so much with white collar jobs. We got a taste of that with the various lockdowns during covid : only the truly essential jobs must be done live and cannot be done remote.

Aye, same. The level at which my time was structured and accounted for on the blue collar level would astound the white collar folks. Entirely directed vs. entirely self-directed.

> It's like they took the people who couldn't work physically, made them feel superior, and for some reason paid them unreasonable wages.

Easy killer, you're projecting.

I could go back to being a bartender today, and could do 90% of the job (I'd have to refresh my memory how to mix a few drinks, but most of em are still there). I could probably go back to Private Investigator, or food truck work too.

But it took a whole lotta learning to get to the point where I can do my current white collar job. No one I bartended with could stay sober 4+ days a week or avoid DUIs; no way in hell I'd trust them with a production GCP cluster.

IMO you work harder in blue collar but its less stress because people don't expect you to hustle to meet a deadline.. I was also a landscaper for a while. Labor is labor in that sort of job, it marches at an expected rate and is dependent on how many hands are working. You often cannot just work for longer, either, if you are bound by the constraints of daylight, or having to clear out of the area by a certain time due to noise perhaps. There is also no way to weed, mow, or lay sod faster than you are already doing it. The deadlines end up moving to fit the realities of the speed of labor against the realities, rather than what happens in white collar work where labor being expected to meet self imposed rigid deadlines, which leads to burnout and poor quality work, and still missing deadlines.

For sure. White collar work is treated as unreal, mentally malleable, in a way people have mostly learned to not do with physical work.

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