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Comment by achenet | Hacker News Reader

Being unable to find underwear that properly suited me, I tried making my own clothes a while back.

The experience was hugely humbling, and completely robbed me of any belief I had in the idea that "hard work pays off" - the person who made my pants probably works 12 hours a day, 6 days in a week in an awful sweatshop, producing garments of a quality I couldn't hope to approximate, and is paid a few dollars a day, while I have a cushy, well paid dev job where I work a fraction of those hours and get paid a few orders of magnitude more.

A friend did (correctly) remark that this was due to programming skills being rarer and more valuable than sewing skills, and this is true, but I remain highly suspicious of anyone suggesting that "work harder" is a route to riches.

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Work hard is one element of success. It is not the only one, but it is very important.

What you work on matters. The proverbial poor starving artist works very hard - but not on something society values and so they don't make much money. Many great jobs require working very hard in school but once you graduate you can coast along doing much less hard work. Even if you work equally hard in school as someone else, different areas of study mean you can expect to earn different amounts.

Luck is also a factor but you cannot control that.

> Luck is also a factor but you cannot control that.

I agree, but making choices which increase exposure to opportunity is often lumped-in with "luck".

Agree. As a programmer that likes to sew in her free time; I do think it is significantly easier to pick 10 random people of the street and make them into excellent sewists within a year than to make them into good programmers.

Programming is harder and more specialized, but it's not harder work.

It's a sigmoid. If you are rich, hard work is unnecessary, if you are broke, hard work is insufficient. In the middle, work ethic has some gradient to it.

Work isn't the only argument to the success function, luck and smarts are in there too. But without the work you need a shit ton more luck and smarts.

I suggest looking into a phenomenon called "unequal exchange". Turns out that officially ending colonialism and actually ending it are two very different things. Your programming skills aren't just paid more because they are rarer, it is because we exploit the global South on a large scale.

The most blatant example of this I came across recently was this website, Asket, who sell clothing but are also fully transparent about their pricing. This is admirable, but also completely turned me off of buying anything from them: it costs them 43 dollars to create and import a pair of jeans, which they then sell for 170. Their value-add in this chain is a website and instagram ads, while the company who actually created the garment gets 29$.

I'm not sure this is entirely true, most textile factory workers could probably not just tailor and sew a shirt, they do exactly one part of a design, like a single zipper, and then hand it to the next person, much like anyone working in a factory.

Kudos for trying to make clothes for yourself. I feel everyone should do that at some point.

It stuns me that anyone ever believed in that myth.

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