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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Someday a “reality check” situation happens. Might be writing a cover letter for their first job. Or trying to pass college-level calculus. But eventually, if someone doesn’t actually know how to read, write, or think logically it comes to a breaking point.

It doesn’t matter if a high school gave someone all As and a college gave out a degree in Community Building. The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth, which is sadly not much for a lot of people.

After all, if you had to hire someone, are you going to offer a job to someone who writes in broken emoji-gibberish and can’t multiply?

One time I got a resume from someone at a fairly well-regarded college for an internship, and the cover letter was a single run-on sentence without any capitalization. How could this person possibly succeed? How much money did they spend getting to this point of obvious failure? Very sad

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>The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth

That's when the the miseducated majority will find that the market is unjust. All goes according to plan.

> barring nepotism,

And that's where Woke comes in.

Sure, you're utterly incompetent but you have the Approved Believes, support the Approved Causes in the Approved Way, and you ticked the right superficial Identity+ checkboxes we needed.

You're hired.

The really sad thing is that the once the markets stop rewarding woke-ism, all these people will be out of a job AND lack the skills to make it in the real world, because these companies have coddled them their entire working lives and stifled any growth opportunities to defend a "safe space".

Believe me, if it were that simple, I wouldn't have spent 3+ months looking for a job.

In any case, what check boxes are you specifically referencing? Appearance?

If you're a straight white male, have you tried identifying as LGBT for oppression ladder points? If I was an American in need of a job I'd do it for sure.

That "reality check" will never come for some people because they will get government jobs where the hiring process depends more on ideology than competence. For example, do you believe that working in the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing requires thinking logically?

Do you believe that so many government jobs that would completely ignore results exist that will absorb our entire society’s yearly group of young adults entering the job market or do you maybe think that’s an extremely niche situation even if we accept at face value that they target ideology over all results?

> The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth, which is sadly not much for a lot of people.

false in the general case, you're basically invoking a just world hypothesis without actual proof for it.

For a counter example, please see slavery - slaves were not paid anything, despite obviously producing something of worth. Furthermore, there was no difference in the salaries between slaves, despite there presumably being differences in output.

For another counter example, you can look into the variation in programmer salaries based on country, or more generally location. The same job will pay anywhere from $180k in SF to $8k in India, due to differences in cost of living, which have a priori zero effect on programmer 'worth', which I presume would be how good the programmer is at writing code and delivering business value.

It is true that at a certain point, 'real skills' matter - eventually, if you're working as a software engineer, you need to write code. However, it is false to assume there is anything besides a maybe a very mild correlation, if any, in the salaries of software engineers and their ability. You can have a Polish dev with 15 years of experience making less than a new grad in California, and that has nothing to do with skill, but everything to do with regional differences in salary.

You're missing the point. OP is generally right. It's a hard world out there, and you have to be educated to succeed at anything more than a trade or service industry job.

> It's a hard world out there, and you have to be educated to succeed at anything more than a trade or service industry job.

this is true.

The market isn't fair however, nor does it pay everyone what they are worth, and I would rather correct that common falsehood when I see it.

The market pays what their skills are worth given the demand for their skills in that location. That's all. If someone is in India they will not be paid a SF salary for many reasons. But the market sorts all of it into a quantifiable price for labor. If you want to voluntarily pay more than what the market demands, that's more akin to charity.

this may be a difference in definition of worth that we have.

You seem to equate "worth" with "market price"/"business value".

I equate "worth" with "how much money they make the business".

So in my defintion/worldview, an programmer in India that increases the click through rate on $AD_TECH_GIANT's ads by 1%, raising the ARR from $1 billion to $1 billion, $10 million dollars is worth $10 million, and a programmer in San Fransisco who accomplishes the same is worth the same.

In your worldview, how much value they bring to the organisation is irrelevant, and they are worth what the market pays them... which honestly doesn't strike me as a particularly useful mental model if you're trying to get rich, but if it works for you, keep using it.

To quote Warren Buffet: "price is what you pay, value is what you get."

I try to find things with a good value/price ratio. Using your model, the value of a thing is it's price, so... not really sure how you can make purchase decisions thinking like that, honestly.

For more thoughts on the matter: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/

By that definition, a business has to always pay someone less than what they're worth in order for hiring them to be a value proposition.

If I'm paid what I'm "worth" why would a business spend any time/effort interviewing and hiring me -- the best that can happen is they will break even through the deal.

It would be like buying a stock you know will flatline at the purchase price for the next 20 years. No monetary loss, but no gain either -- that's almost the definition of opportunity cost.

everything you have used as an example is not a free market, it is government interference.

1) slavery was enforced by the government who had use of force to compel. There was no voluntary two party agreements.

2) countries are governmental constructs with barriers enforced by use of force. A polish programmer cant work in the US due to governmental interference.

Now that the borders are wide open expect to see programmers exploiting the work loopholes to get work visas that allow them to work at market wages.

there is no perfect information and there will always be mismatches. But in a free market those mismatches are temporary. Also the market may be valuing things other than technical prowess (e.g. english proficiency, understanding of cultural norms etc)

Voluntary two party agreements work because they are enforced by a government.

Markets only exist in the presence of government. Read David Graeber's Debt if you want a history of how markets and money work - generally speaking, they are things created by governments, to ease the work of figuring out taxation. Those quarters and nickels and dimes only have value because you know that come tax season, Uncle Sam will knock on your door and ask you for some, and if you don't give them to him, he'll toss you in jail. This creates a demand for those coins, and therefore a market for them, so now Uncle Sam can pay his soldiers in coin, the soldiers trade it with civilians for food and lodging and boom, it's a market!

You seem to be doing that thing where you want to believe the world is fair, so you invent this magical free market to be able to pretend that life is fair.

To paraphrase Dan Luu: markets are people, all the way down.

you can read https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ and https://danluu.com/talent/

for more info.

> barring nepotism

this is a pretty big issue, though. even here on hn, many folks claim the best or only way to get a good job is by networking

Getting a first job is very helpful with nepotism. But to sustain being a negative employee - one that brings no value if not hurts the organization - I have only seen with the children / relatives of executives, and in the government.

I got a job as a "student worker" when I was in college, because my dad wanted to hire me in his graphics studio office.

I was lazy one month and he wrote me up, gave me a PIP. I worked harder after that. :-)

The best part of it was that I got to take walks with my dad during the lunch hour every day.

Most networking is not nepotism.

networking != nepotism

This isn’t true except for at the most extreme examples. Plenty of people have been promoted “out of the way”.

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