Ask HN: What do you do to counter stigma with working in tech?

Perhaps look for social settings in which 'what do you do for a living' is not the beginning and end of the conversation.

Living in a capitalist society, I feel that this is basically impossible. It's 40+ hours of what you do a week and dictates a lot of what you can do. My friends who are working for minimum wage in NYC can be cool people but they aren't flying to Miami for art week like my other friends.

I feel that this is basically impossible

It does not appear to be the case for a number of people also living in a capitalist society.

My friends who are working for minimum wage in NYC can be cool people but they aren't flying to Miami for art week

Maybe you should take them? Trips are a great way to build a friendship or find out it's less than you hoped.

I'm not a charity. I'm not going to create some weird dynamic with friends where I am flying people out to expensive festivals. How often are you giving your friends thousands of dollars? It's not something I'd advocate for.

How often are you giving your friends thousands of dollars? It's not something I'd advocate for.

I'm not the one posting on HN about the burdens of having boring friends so a broader view could be a starting point.

> How often are you giving your friends thousands of dollars?

It's not all that rare in my circle of friends, to be honest, even from back before any of us were making serious money.

If you include "in kind" gifting rather than just cash -- for instance, inviting a friend to come along on a trip and paying their way -- then this is quite common with my social group. It's mostly to minimize the hassle since, in the long run as everyone does this for each other, it all evens out.

Right but the point is that these people could never give back because they have no money. So, it's literally giving them a lot of money.

Which (in our group) is perfectly fine. There are several friends who are less financially capable than the rest. Nobody cares. Friendship is much more important than money.

I’m impressed you even have “friends”. By the way you described it I think you are talking about assets

It's not that black and white, is it? Maybe thousands of dollars is a bit much (unless you're quite wealthy), but I've certainly helped pay for plane tickets, hotels, concert tickets, etc. for my friends (usually ranging from like $50-$300 though, not thousands).

It's not like "Hey, I'm rich and I'm just going to buy out the entire concert so we can have a private show", more like "Hey bud, I'm going on this work trip and I have a few days at the end... wanna come for the weekend? You can have the other hotel bed and I'll split the airfare with you." It's fun for both of us that way, and a nice treat that they wouldn't normally be able to afford.

You don't have to fly them anywhere fancy, either. "Hey, local art show this weekend and I have a couple of tix! Wanna come? My treat, but drinks on you."

It doesn't have to be weird as long as there's no expectation of anything serious in return, you're not giving more than you can afford, and the friend is providing some sort of reciprocity in return – as measured in friendship, not in dollars. Maybe they make a kick-ass friendsgiving dinner with all your favorite things. Maybe they commit (finally) to that D&D campaign you've been trying to get them to join for the last five years. Maybe you've just known them for a decade and you really value their friendship, even though your incomes have drifted apart over the years. It doesn't matter. Good friends are worth it, within reason.

Now, that CAN turn exploitative if you let it... but just don't be a doormat. If some person expects you to pay for all their drinks and outings every time you go out and never calls you up unless they need something, well, they're probably using you. But that's a pretty different situation from a genuine friend that you've known and treasured for a while who just happens to make less money than you. If you enjoy their company and can afford to bring them along somewhere, wouldn't it be fun for both of you?

What? How is it impossible? Many people work 40 hour weeks and still have outside friends and interests, at least before they have kids.

If you can afford to, why not join your rich friends once every few years to art week, and meet more people there?

If you can't or don't want to, find a local art event and invite a few of your poorer friends to go.

Generally speaking and to super-stereotype it, I find time spent with my working class friends generally to be more engaging, fun, and casual than with my friends higher up the capitalist ladder. Working class folks don't want to spend any more time thinking about work than necessary, so when they want to relax, they do. The more ambitious types end up higher on the ladder, sure, but sometimes it overtakes their life and becomes the only thing they can chase or think about anymore, and that makes them pretty dull to anybody else.

Just don't be that person and actively foster your other friendships and the rest just kinda happens. That might require some tradeoffs in how you time manage, or work-life balance, etc., but nothing worth doing is free, right?

Edit: You have to earn enough to support your lifestyle. But your desired lifestyle can be modified. On one hand being poor sucks, no matter how many friends you have. On the other hand being rich and lonely sucks too. I've known people on every part of that spectrum.

IMHO somewhere in the middle is the most sustainable and happy, if you can swing it, but it will almost always require compromises. Maybe that means your career will be capped at some level you choose when you can't put in 80-hour weeks for your beloved startup. Maybe that means you can't afford to live in the Bay Area. But I mean, that's all of life... we pick and choose what's important to us, and if you're not happy with those choices, it's OK to reevaluate them and make changes every so often.

Why fly to Miami for "art week" when you can experience powerful art in everyday life, such as a message board comment that begins as a critique of capitalism and concludes with the difficulty of making friends in a society where so few people can fly to Miami for "art week"?

> Living in a capitalist society, I feel that this is basically impossible

then you put yourself in a situation where there’s no way out. It is a you problem. If you are ashamed of yourself there’s no solution besides changing yourself.

> What do you do to counter this?

I don't say what I do for a living except when it's important to reveal that (which it rarely is). If pressed, I'll just say "I'm a programmer", make sure to mention that I don't work for a SV-style company, and leave it at that.

Fortunately, at least in my part of the US, "what do you do for a living" is a question that is rarely casually asked.

> Fortunately, at least in my part of the US, "what do you do for a living" is a question that is rarely casually asked.

This is so interesting. I wonder if there really is a strong geographical component to this? That mirrors my own experiences primarily living in smaller towns, with stints elsewhere.

Anecdotally, a female relative of mine was getting really frustrated with the straight dating scene in the SF metro area, which according to her was full of men whose primary dating persona is their wealth and status.

She kept going on date after date with people she found utterly boring, who were primarily concerned about showing off how successful they were and not really interested in her or forming a connection over mutual interests. It's like they were looking for a trophy wife.

Having primarily lived in small towns where "what do you do" just isn't as big a deal, I found that rather off-putting and asked why she was going out with those men to begin with. We looked at her own dating profile, but it also kinda mirrored theirs: started out by mentioning that she worked at some household name tech company (not a FAANG but close to it), her educational background, etc. I made the comment that it looked like a resume rather than a dating profile. Suggested that maybe toning down the status signaling would let her find more "normal" people. She was probably intimidating.

She ended up revamping it and trying to meet people based on identified shared interests rather than levels of accomplishment. Went on a few better dates, soon met a climber she really liked, and they got married not long after. Turns out he's also of a similar status (I guess you have to be to live in SF proper) but that wasn't what they bonded over initially.

As a straight dude, I saw less of that on the dating apps, but there was still some. When I was single, I traveled across the country and checked out the online dating scenes in many places... in D.C. it was ALL status signaling, and I never felt so inadequate in my whole life, lol: women who have multiple post-grad degrees working for some important bleeding-heart nonprofit (but without an accompanying ego, thank god), civil servants, etc. In Chicagoland it was a mix of finance people and regular people who loved music, food, and summers especially. Not a lot of techies. In the SF area it was a lot of tech, yes, but also a few working-class outdoorsy types. In the smaller towns it was totally different, and profession almost never came up. It was usually offhandedly mentioned (or just alluded to) in like the third or fourth paragraph. People seemed a lot happier in those communities too.

Shrug. I don't know where the OP is located, but maybe that alone can shape their outlook... (edit: they live in NYC, as they mentioned in the OP. Makes more sense.)

First, consider that the culture of the city you're in can play a role https://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html But more than that, the neighborhood or whatever natural social circle you've found yourself in is that way, but it need not be that way with some extra digging into other subgroups of people around you.

Second, consider your own behavior and whether it's not tech itself but another aspect that you're confusing with being in tech, simply because people are (annoyingly) too polite to tell you.

In "tech" I find almost as much diversity of personalities and quirks than in the general population. I haven't personally experience what you're talking about, but that doesn't mean you're wrong. Perhaps the nearest neighbors that are lowest friction to socialize with aren't the best choice?

Every city has a culture and NYC especially does. That said, I find this disdain for tech workers to be universal in every city. Even in SFBA, it exists largely and tech workers themselves are self-loathing. I was always around people who were so critical of tech even in SFBA and thought I'd never meet people who hated tech and tech workers more... then I moved and realized most of society would prefer us to be dead than living.

I didn't think people in tech were any weirder than the general population. Then I kept meeting infra engineers from big tech and I understood where the stigma came from. These folks make up the majority of engineers in big cities. You don't need thousands of engineers to work on the Instagram/FB app itself. You need thousands of engineers to make it scale to billions of users. There's always less openings for product engineers than there is for infra.

My behaviors are pretty normal. When I avoid the conversation, I get a lot more good feedback and people at least in NYC assume I'm in finance or something. It's when they find out that I'm in tech that they really start to distance themselves. I've learned to avoid the conversation due to this.

> My behaviors are pretty normal.

In my experience, the thing that makes people wary isn't that they think you might be some sort of strange geek. It's that there's fairly widespread anger and fear over the effects that the tech industry has on society.

Honestly, that's not the main feedback I get. They just don't like the low status associated with tech workers. They assume everyone in tech is a dweeb and everyone is very concerned with being around people they think are cool and importantly that others think are cool.

I don't think the anger/fear thing is really much of an issue. If that was the case, all these finance bros would be getting hanged.

Ahh, then we're talking about different things entirely. I've never encountered an issue about social status, personally, so have no useful comments on that aspect, aside from guessing this is a problem with certain regional cultures or subcultures.

Do you have to hang around those people...? As far as I can tell, none of my friends or even acquaintances have ever judged me for "status", low or high. Or maybe they have without me knowing, but then they self-select out of my friend group anyway so it works out...?

There are certainly people, orgs, social circles, etc. who don't care about your social status, income level, or any of that nonsense. They can be interest-based (some activity), values-based, cultural/subcultural, whatever.

> everyone is very concerned with being around people they think are cool and importantly that others think are cool.

Among adults, this really shouldn't be a thing after high school...

Nobody is "cool" to everyone. People gather with people they like, doing things they enjoy together. It's not about trying to be cool and impressing the people who look down on you. Fuck them. Just find your own people around whom you can be yourself, they can be themselves, and everyone laughs and has a good time together. Then all the class differences and such melt away and you just learn to treasure each other as people, not as spreadsheet rows. Maybe finance bros just aren't your crowd. Who cares? Don't mingle with them and find people less judgmental and more interested in the same things you are.

> It's when they find out that I'm in tech that they really start to distance themselves

is it? or is this what you’re fragile ego tells you in the moments of rejection?

have in mind that your standing is causing a big rejection among other be ppl working in tech so there is more to it, mainly your own behavior

> I didn't think people in tech were any weirder than the general population

not all of us, but some yes. You might benefit from some self awareness

I generally hang out with people who don’t give a crap about my occupation. They wouldn’t care if I was a janitor or a physician. Some of them are friends from middle school, some are newer friends. We generally don’t talk about work, we bond over other things.

I don’t know NYC but I hope that out of 20 million people, not all are obsessed with work.

Data point: it is not at all my experience that there is a stigma to working in tech in Chicagoland. For one thing, everybody has friends already working in tech or IT in some capacity (and normal people don't care about the distinction).

I try my best not to talk about my job when I'm not at my job

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If you're picking your profession based on "social status", you're in a loser's game. You can't win at status; you can only lose. So don't play. Instead, pick a profession that you're good at, that you like doing, and that pays well enough.

Is there a stigma? Sure, probably deservedly so. FAANG hasn't exactly been a benevolent force for social good, and tech has greatly worsened livability for everyday people across much of the urban U.S..

That said, I've worked in some form as a web dev for 20+ years and this has never been a problem. My friends have been farmers, trailworkers, solar people, museum people, scientists, yogis, veterinarians, service industry folks, climbers, hikers, animal lovers, and yes, a few coders too. They're mostly blue-collar, and they don't judge me by my profession but by the quality of the time we spend together, our shared interests and values, etc..

I think it's more a matter of picking social situations (and circles) that expose you to more diverse swaths of society. If you spend all your time among strongly capitalist hoity-toities, then yeah, maybe you're gonna get judged for being a tech person (and makes sense too, with most white-collar+ jobs requiring years and years of education and hard work and ladder-climbing and sucking up, meanwhile some techie out of boot camp makes 2x the money and thinks they know it all while contributing net negatively to society... why wouldn't they judge us?).

But that's not all of society. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time volunteering, doing different jobs, going outdoors, etc. and met a lot of people that way. I was always the "techie guy" who could make their websites or fix their machines. I often earned more than them, but I never lorded it over them... it never really even came up. I didn't let my profession define me or my relationships. It was just something I did for a paycheck, the same way they did their thing for a paycheck. Never once been accused of being autistic, an incel, or anything like that; in fact many of my friends were women from completely different fields.

I'm probably more extroverted than most techies, but so what? It still requires active development of other interests and active participation in local communities: volunteering, civics, community events, outdoors, neighbors, etc. None of it came naturally or automatically, but only through sustained active effort. That's just a people & networking thing, and maybe techies are less inclined to do them, but they work for us just as they work for anyone else. It's a developed skillset & social network.