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Comment by 20after4 | Hacker News Reader

Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google?

edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.

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absolutely and i'm surprised that you don't think so.

e: and to your edit, i'm talking about social/moral status

Can you explain what you mean by social/moral status? I haven't seen a big run of non-profit workers marrying movie stars or becoming Pope.

Isn't the Pope like the canonical high-status non-profit worker?

Yes, but notice that the pope gets paid very well

I thought the pope doesn't receive a salary?

That's right, my bad, I just meant that he's clearly doing just fine but said something very wrong instead

Yes, however, my point is that the vast majority of people working for non-profits do not receive that sort of recognition. So what does "social status" mean?

Your edit is comparing opposites, basically making the ops point for them.

You work at google for money. Money is high status under capitalism.

You work at Wikipedia for status in the traditional sense - you trade capitalist status (the salary) for the higher actual status of working for a non profit.

No one thinks non-profit work is ‘high-status.’ People do it because making the world better in some way is more personally motivating than figuring out how to put video ads on refrigerators or whatever.o

Ok, I don't necessarily disagree, but it is thus living your values, which at the very least increases ones self confidence and self perception of status.

Whether one thinks that improves one's status in the eyes of others imo depends on one's cynicism. "Whatever, I'm living my values, they just don't get it. Maybe others will one day."

That's how I see it for myself anyway, if I'm being honest. But in the end I don't think there's any better path to happiness and fulfillment than living my values.

Sure, but happiness and fulfillment isn't status. Not because there's anything wrong with them but because that's not what "status" means.

feeling better because your job fits better in your moral framework that you get from society is a status-mediated effect and i feel you can usually find social scaffolding under things that are articulated as purely intrinsic.

If words don’t mean what they mean, absolutely

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