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Comment by akolbe | Hacker News Reader

Aye, you put your finger on something there. Reminds me of how common it is for menial jobs to be outsourced to immigrants or seasonal labour. Fruit picking in the UK to Eastern Europeans, agricultural work in Israel to Thais, etc.

Someone has to empty the bins. I guess like anything emptying bins is a job you can enjoy more or less, depending on your inner attitude to doing it, and your ability to "make the best of it" (by having a laugh with mates on the job etc.) but surely it's hard to be creative in it.

There are millions of jobs like that that have to be done by someone – unless everyone, including those who enjoy that self-fulfilment in their work, somehow were to chip in and do their bit.

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Ironically emptying the bins and picking fruits might be more directly meaningful for people then building the new generation ad platform/social media/saas tool.

Picking fruit would have been incredibly meaningful if you had spent the year doing the variety of agricultural activities leading up to it. There’s a reason so many cultures had harvest festivals. But now rather than a whole area getting together to literally pick the fruits of their year-long labour and celebrate we’ve optimised the process by just bringing in some seasonal workers.

So you want all of NYC to have harvest festivals?

Those traditions and rituals are alive and well in small communities. Modern agriculture is based on the need to feed millions and millions of people. That’s why it is the way it is.

I think GP means that picking fruit has a direct, meaningful impact on consumers--fresh food--whereas the positive impact of the next saas thing is indirect and often dubious.

But yeah, harvesting as a community sounds more meaningful to workers than mass fruit production does.

I think you both overcomplicate things.

Haha, yeah. I have a side story about working in construction with my dad. He was a home builder and was helping to build out a line of new apartments. It was very straightforward work -- he did the tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. I was his helper. He was excellent at it. All the buzzwords inclusive of efficiency and quality. It was fulfilling work to me and I had a sense of pride working alongside my dad. I made $10/hour, $80 a day.

Now I work in FinTech. The fulfillment is different, sometimes it's good. But I reflect on this time often. I own a small home now and my dad comes around to help me fix or remodel stuff. I'm handier now because of those experiences -- I think I do find a little more fulfillment when working with my hands. I also find myself in my garden more often which brings a little more joy than my day job. Perhaps it's just balance.

Its for the mental exercise, and the practice. But if i had to do it a second time id kill myself.

Some of my friends from Poland went to Western/Northern Europe to pick tomatoes, salad, cherries etc. None of them ever spoke about meaning of the job, only that it was long, hard, uncomfortable hours in sun, rain etc. and that it paid good money.

100%, I was thinking this exact same thing. I couldn't help but ponder the irony that during the pandemic, the vast majority of "essential workers", i.e. people we really need to fulfill the foundational layer of the economy, were usually the lowest paid: garbage men, farm labor, construction labor, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, etc. The famous "Pyramid of Capitalist System", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System, had never felt more spot on to me.

Meanwhile, I'm relatively very highly paid, and while I really like my job because I get to work with interesting technology and I think my coworkers are fantastic, the only reason my job exists at all is because of the extreme insanity of the US healthcare system. Literally everyone would be better off if there wasn't a reason for my job to exist in the first place.

We make sure that all important jobs are easy to do so that they can reliably get done. Hard unreliable jobs can thus never be as important as the easy ones, they are still important but never as important because we don't want to rely on unreliable work.

You can see that in software orgs as well, the easiest tasks are also the most important, like ensuring the site continues to run and handling breaking changes in dependencies, those tasks has to be done or your entire product is gone. But the highest paid engineers probably don't work on those things, instead they might look at adding more features or drafting new architecture, those tasks aren't as important but they are much harder to do so are better paid in general and you require higher skilled workers.

So in general the lower paid the more important their work is, because higher skilled tasks are harder and less reliably done so we try to not rely on them getting done. Think famous painter vs low paid icon designer, which work is more important? Goes for most things.

Thanks very much. I've heard this phrased different ways before and I understand it, but "We make sure that all important jobs are easy to do so that they can reliably get done" is probably the clearest and most succinct way I've heard this put.

I worked as a garbage man to pay for the start of my software ventures. It was the best combination thinkable of sitting in a room on a chair behind a computer, being in the software clouds, typing away, and being outside, working out, having fun and getting enough sunlight.

These both completely different things balanced each other out perfectly.

So you’re saying that collecting garbage enabled you to learn about garbage collection?

Nice. I think the key thing here is, or was, the mix: the two activities complementing each other.

Also, perhaps, the knowledge that both were temporary and meant to lead to other, or better, things.

"Don't forget you're here forever" can be a real downer sometimes.

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