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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

There is a saying "The strongest horse gets whipped the hardest", the object of the phrase should give away how long people have known this.

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Given the state of the world today, the quote seems almost prescient when you realize that no horse has ever the option to become the coachman no matter how hard he tries.

"The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but it never became the kolkhoz's chairman".

All farm animals are equal. Some are just more equal than others.

A supermajority of the wealthiest people on the planet came from middle or upper middle class backgrounds.

So what? Still one in a million horses go on to be the coachman or so. Its not a guarantee you are able to climb like you are implying.

This is a quantifiably studied subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

Half of us think that you are implying that hard work will get you into that wealthy group, the other half thinks you mean that those who don't come from a privileged background will never make it to the top?

So which is it?

The contrasting sentiment is "the squeaky wheel gets the oil". That is, the employee who is the most vocal will get the most attention and advantages.

Yeah the real question is are you more like a wheel or more like a horse? Neither analogy is perfect but....

But the wheel still never gets to drive the car.

That's true regardless if the wheel squeaks or not. <insert won't get promoted to wheel drive pun here>

but the oil is to get the wheel's performance back in order. Oil isn't a reward in this metaphor.

I thought oil was money in this metaphor.

It's not a very precise metaphor because there is no way for us to say if a wheel prefers to be oiled or dry.

I think you're gravely mistaken about that. I have absolutely heard people quoting this to justify demands of rewards, whether monetary or status; an even pithier version is 'if you don't ask, you don't get.'

I once worked with someone who got both of us a pay rise by vocally complaining to a senior manager.

He specifically used the "Squeaky wheel gets the oil" metaphor to describe what he'd done and why it worked.

The "oil" is money.

> squeaky wheel

Somebody who makes trouble and gets noticed for it.

> gets the oil

Is subjected to 'corrective measures.'

It's another way of saying the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

No, it's not. It means if you make your case yourself instead of waiting to be noticed, you are more likely to be rewarded.

Grease isn't necessarily a reward, just something to make it quiet. It's been reinterpreted for sure, but wheels aren't bothered by them making noise, why would they care about grease?

I was about to say, "filing this one in the 'No S#!t, Sherlock' folder"

Maybe that's your lot in life in rigid socialist countries (USSR) but it's by no means a given in the US. If my boss pisses me off than fuck him, I quit. Yet that doesn't happen, I work harder than anybody on my team, and I stay loyal and get what I want in life (and then some) because I negotiated and cooperated. As a young "human resource", when you're starting out, you've got jack and shit so it feels like you're 100% dominated and dependent on a world to provide and think for you. That's not the case. In China -- in the 1950's -- millions of farmers starved to death while providing food for millions of Chinese. It was nuts. And that happened because people stopped acting like humans and negotiating and cooperating. They devolved into top down linear hierarchies where somebody does that for you...Be grateful that's not the case and use what you have to your advantage and don't expect every manager to be either a psychotic or a saint. And if your city is bad than move. Adventure.

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