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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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