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Comment by DangerousPie | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like all of this could be solved by not manually paying your rent at the last minute?

This is a blind spot. Generally speaking the devs are comparatively well off people and they don't live paycheck-to-paycheck. So by default devs won't even conceive of the difficulties of people who are in fact living paycheck-to-paycheck and have little buffer in their bank accounts. That's the blind spot. They won't know this is a problem unless a good PM tells them about it. Ultimately it is the job of the PM to tell the devs how important (or not) it is to do these optimizations, and how important (or not) it is to test with low-end devices with little RAM or free disk space.

This is something I struggle with a bit as a dev

I am pretty well off now but I come from a pretty poor background. I used to have to drive a cheque to my landlord's office when rent was due, during university in the late 2000s

I thought a lot of my fellow devs would be from similar backgrounds, but that is not the case at all mostly. I find a lot of my coworkers come from white collar families, or relatively well off immigrant families and I am the outlier coming from a very blue collar family

It is very common for me to have a very different perspective on things than my coworkers.

Economic background shapes us so much more than people realize

First sentence in that (made up) story:

>Rent's due today, thank heavens I just got paid.

I assume the "last minute" wasn't entirely their choice.

This is hideous.

A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. They can't afford to pay rent before they get paid.

Besides the fact that the story is an example, is fully made up, and you clearly didn't read the actual article: what an incredibly out of touch response.

> I don't set up standing orders, got burned once with unarranged overdraft fees, that wasn't a good month. Better to be late a day or two with rent payment.

Anyway, this same sort of nonsense could also make it very difficult to enroll in autopay, so the main points stand.

They made up the story

Doesn't matter if the story is made up or not. It's a believable story so we should treat it as if it's real.

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