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Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me.

Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be good writers--I don't see why the randomly selected waitress should be better. I should say that the demands of the two jobs are quite different, anyway: the waitress has to be able constantly switch attention to multiple people and multiple tasks, the writer (or programmer) has to be able to focus on one thing for relatively long times.

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> Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter."

Yeah, I don't buy that either.

I know that the best software engineering work I've done in my entire life happened when I was working as a hotel housekeeper, before I was programming professionally.

It was because cleaning hotel rooms is a purely physical, and highly repetitive job. Every day at work, I was mentally "checked out", working on difficult programming problems in my head while my body just robotically did the work.

Once I was programming professionally, I no longer had the luxury of spending so much time deeply thinking about programming problems.

Is that an example of you:

A) being a waitress learning to be a writer?

B) an intellectual learning to be a waiter?

I would have thought A, but you imply it's B.

That's interesting to me, because when I was a waiter, I certainly didn't feel B. My high school classmate who went to Cornell and I spent an hour or two a day with senior year pretended they didn't remember me. Customers constantly talked down to me.

I built an app to replace the restaurant computer, occasionally people would ask why I was taking orders on an iPod and when I'd explain, it made things _worse_: there was more than a handful of times they'd argue about rounding and the local tax rate.

I think the author meant its _much_ harder to take the abusive management, extremely physical work, and occassional abusive customer when you think of yourself as an intellectual working a sidejob, as opposed to it being your job where the programming is a side passion.

I meant it as "A", but on second thought, you're right, it's more like "B".

I suppose that my real, underlying point is that you can't reliably tell what a person's skillset is by what they do for a living.

I'd have said, Neither. Having worked briefly on cleaning crews, I believe that the work comes in larger and more predictable blocks than waiting tables does, and leaves one more time for thinking one's own thoughts.

No, you can't tell about a person's skillset. I teach ESL, and have taught

  a. An employee of the the Brazilian national health department now cleaning houses in Montgomery County, Maryland.
  b. A Nicaraguan attorney now cleaning rooms for a Washington, DC, hotel.
  c. A Salvadoran archivist doing construction work here.

And forty years ago, I caught a cab driven by a man from west Africa with a degree in urban planning, who had found it better for his health to leave his native country, where he was not well regarded by the government.

And there are plenty of native-born Americans who are holding down jobs that are not commensurate with their skills or anyway potentials.

From my experience, the hardest part of being a waiter was dealing with customers.

I worked hard physically as a dishwasher or warehouse worker, but had little mental stress.

I only lasted a few weeks as a waiter. Despite the much higher tips, dealing with bad customers was so stressful I couldn't handle it and it significantly affected my studying.

Whereas I never felt that tired when doing physical labor.

Is it not common in America to share tips with the entire staff?

In Europe there is much less of a tipping culture, but at the end of the night all tips go in one big pot and then get divided amongst the staff.

It depends. Admittedly this was 35 years ago or so, but generally a certain percentage would go towards the bar and other staff, but mostly you would keep your own tips.

It’s probably due to a difference in culture. The US was still very anti-socialism at the time. But the culture was definitely that you should keep the rewards of your own labor.

At smaller restaurants there was never any pooling at all.

Both methods are common. It's discussed before you start.

Most servers I know prefer to keep their own.

> From my experience, the hardest part of being a waiter was dealing with customers.

I was a fine dining server for a couple years while in college before finding my first programming job. It taught me how to deal with pretty much any kind of person.

Brandon Sanderson has a decent quote from Secret Project #1, that makes me think a bit.

> That is one of the great mistakes people make: assuming that someone who does menial work does not like thinking. Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind. If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.

Truly, there was nothing more mentally productive than a day on the tractor, or driving fence posts and stretching wire, or clearing.

I don't buy this either. I spend my 8 hours coding (yes, mostly coding) and still come home and study most nights. I don't feel any difference at night whether I spent the day doing yardwork or coding.

I suspect because you have not done manual labor. When you really get in a routine, it just has this feeling at the end of the day after being outside in the sun or snow. It is nothing like sitting in front of a computer.

I firmly believe that in our dna we were wired to be outside most of the time.

Well, there is lots of evidence that movement and exercise is excellent for your brain physiologically and psychologically.

https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-...

> Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world.

Really depends on what kind of labor is it, not all of it is equal. I've had a new doors installed in my apartment yesterday, and the amount of troubleshooting and stress that the installers went through is not smaller than what I've faced in my programming job. But, I didn't have to do it while sweating from lifting 100 kg doors onto fourth floor, and later repeatedly trying to wrangle them into place.

Right, that’s the “menial” in the previous sentence to your quote. Washing dishes, cleaning floors, routine stuff where the mind can wander. For me when I was younger this was driving a mower around and around and around — not really intense physical labor, just a rote mechanical job that doesn’t consume much mental capacity.

I’m not a door pro, but my experience with diying doors puts it definitely NOT in the category of mindless!

“An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body.” ― George S. Patton Jr.

Other developers keep trying to persuade me to use multiple monitors (I have a laptop - I can't be bothered plugging it in every day, and I'm used to switching between windows with the keyboard). I struggle to explain to them that, even if I was less 'efficient', that time I 'lose' is not wasted - It's thinking time.

Caitriona Lally won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature while working as a janitor at Trinity College. I believe she maintains that job today.

That you think waiting is a job that doesn't require mental presence tells me you have never done it.

Sure, set up and clear down have plenty of routine zone out time - but service is maintaining multiple concurrent to do lists in your head whilst keeping an eye out on the environment for additional tasks.

I was terrible at the job because I have poor short term memory (my lists dropped items all the damned time). But I sure as hell was too busy to contemplate some higher order problem

I believe the point is not that it's easy to teach people to write well but that it's easier than teaching people to work hard.

Every Ph.D I've met has been a very hard worker, on par with the people I worked with in the military.

I never seen PhD as a program that is attempting to teach people write. There is absolutely no reason to expect someone with PhD to write better then other people.

If anything, a PhD program teaches you how to write faster while maintaining an acceptable quality: Journal papers, conference presentations, and funding agency reports are all long-form writing projects that come up quite frequently and distract from the research (the fun part). Most of the value from this writing comes from it being accepted; improving quality beyond this level has rapidly diminshing returns.

My writing definitely improved tenfold.

Weirdly I have personally never considered PhD to be indicator of being particularly smart. Probably above median, but not special. On other hand it sure requires lot of work to be done. Or at least time spend.

That tracks. I’d add that Ph.D. laureates tends to be people who like to pursue knowledge in depth. I think it’s this, combined with the work ethic and discipline, that make them excel in certain fields.

"Hard working" and "smart" are very different things.

One could almost say that not being smart requires you to be harder working. (At least that's what I'm telling myself to keep working hard.)

I'm not sure that schools teach the PhD track to be writers. They must write, but they are not really expected to write well. An MFA in creative writing, sure, but that's a different sort.

I think of the modern or contemporary "intellectuals" I have read and many are mediocre writers. For every William James there's a Pearse or a Lewis who is hard to read.

But I think that the author has a different idea in mind, that of the novelist, story writer or journalist. A lack of life experience and appreciation for dialog can lead to poor writing in these domains, and perhaps a waiter would have a leg up.

> I'm not sure that schools teach the PhD track to be writers.

In my experience many PhD candidates are required to write in turgid and stilted prose b/c it sounds more professional.

Not PhD, but the masters program I did (urban planning) had a very strong focus on writing. I’m thankful for that, because it turns out I primarily write and edit all day. And it keeps me in business because I work with engineers and architects whose focus at school was, understandably, not writing, and I prove my worth by editing their work.

Could you be taking the word "writer" to mean something different than the author? In the context of the article what I got from that line was that it would be easier to teach a waiter to be a food critic/journalist than to teach a food critic/journalist to be a waiter, more than it meant "writer" in the broader sense. I sort of agree with that interpretation. I'm not good with names, but the only names that I can tell you off the top of my head when it comes to food "writers" are: Nikolaj Kirk and Anthony Bourdain and they are both chefs.

Everyone learns to write in school. A waiting job most can pick up but not all. I couldn't get past serving training. Carrying four plates and keeping them straight takes without spilling is for others.

Everyone writes in school, I assume. Not everyone learns to write well, in fact I suspect that most do not.

> Everyone writes in school, I assume.

Not true unfortunately. You would t believe how many illiterate or near illiterate kids are in high school.

I'm essentially a professional writer at this point. Certainly I learned a lot from technical courses in school and working professionally in technical roles but, at this point, a lot was writing for newspapers and other publications.

Everyone learns to carry plates while growing up. There's a lot more to being a good waiter than just writing down orders and carrying plates. And there's a lot more to being a good writer than just knowing how to write sentences.

If you can't carry the plates all of the other stuff stops mattering..

Good writer is a qualification that could mean millions or the top 5.

> Everyone learns to write in school.

This is like saying everyone learns math in school. It's technically correct, but only if you ignore the vast difference in skill between the average person and (e.g.) an accomplished novelist.

> Everyone learns to write in school.

Check out studies of adult functional literacy. It's, uh, not great.

Lemme modify the writers words for you to more accurately describe the phenomena : “I suspect it’s easier to teach a good waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a good waiter.”

Being excellent at balancing a stressful, fast paced, work environment applies to many jobs. But being excellent at being an “intellectual” whatever the hell that even means (writers? Programmers?), does not really apply to very many jobs.

Person who engages in critical thinking and reasoning

And meanwhile back in real world many intellectuals worked as waiters here and there to get extra money.

> I don't see why the randomly selected waitress should be better

More than a few of them may already posses an English degree (:

> schools have failed to teach PhDs to be good writers

I suspect you cannot teach that. I mean, you can whip the cur into following basic rules and avoiding egregious mistakes, but you cannot teach taste.

I imagine that many people have taste that appeals to some people. The problem is that many teachers mark down any taste that doesn't appeal to them, effectively ensuring that writers choose only the blandest safest optiona when writing.

I think we should also ask what sort of writers do schools train PhDs and students to be? The writing for thesis or scientific articles is different from most other writing. Just as is legal writing for example. They really are not there to teach them poetry... Just to efficiently and in way that passes review to communicated inside the community.

School actively teaches people to be bad writers.

How so?

Because it prioritizes exercises that are easy for a teacher to mark over exercises that develop real writing skills. Everything is broken down into elementary mechanical tasks and marked with rubrics. Writing is taught as if it were mathematics, that you can just follow a simple algorithm and you are done!

Turns out, neither great writing nor mathematics work that way. Both are very hard and require non intuitive leaps of inspiration.

Following the algorithms for writing makes you neither a bad nor a good writer. If you learn and follow: tell them what you'll tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them; you writing will be formulaic and boring, but competent. If you do all the things, you'll be an ok writer.

Boring writing is bad writing. If you can't holder your reader's attention long enough for them to get what you're trying to say then you've failed to communicate. If you follow that formula, not only will your writing be boring but too long as well.

Step one, then, is to have something interesting to say.

Unfortunately it isn’t generally the case that people have something interesting to write at length about, and even more rarely do they have something interesting to say about the specific topic assigned.

I struggled with a teacher in high school who expected me to write essays with a formula I could never really master, there might have been other things going on but a big one was that I read so much that I had so many examples to work from that her formula didn't make a lot of sense to me.

Even though I struggled to get a "D" in her class I am certainly not a bad writer, I've made a living at times writing, I've written book chapters, blog posts, contracts, standards documents and all sorts of things. I struggled to master the language used in academic writing though.

The biggest way school teaches bad writing is by asking for minimum word counts instead of maximum.

I took a two-year course, where our homework was primarily focused on developing an essay at the end of each class (about 14 of them all told). All the classes had similar formats and requirements, and so all the essays also had maximum word counts. I really, really appreciated that, because it surely forced me to distill all my thoughts into the most essential passages and cut out the fat.

Occasionally, I would be plagued by a bit of writer's block, and I couldn't think up enough to write, but eventually I could gin up enough logorrhea that I would have a nice tapestry to begin snipping out the wordy and irrelevant bits.

And that was my favorite part about the classes, being able to write a really tight research/opinion paper every few weeks.

See Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

Essentially, students are, from the time they start school until they graduate, taught to write to an audience – teachers – who are both:

1. Paid to read it, and have no real possibility to stop reading because they get bored (teachers will read anything from beginning to end).

2. Looking for, in the writing, evidence that the student has learned the information.

Neither of those two things are true of the rest of the world, when they are reading a book or an article by an aspiring professional writer. Therefore, writing to such an audience will require new skills which most people have never practiced.

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