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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Then why take the job if it does not pay as well as other jobs? I don't understand how it makes sense for anyone in the equation.

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Because the serving industry is a huge job market in the US. I was at a random restaurant / diner having breakfast, which in the Netherlands would have maybe one or two serving personnel running around - wasn't particularly large, maybe 30-40 seats. They had five or six people running around.

I have to add though, the serving and attention to customers was much better than over here. You're frequently out of drink in restaurants/bars over here, and the serving personnel doesn't seem to have the time or will to take care of that. Which is a missed sale, of course; over the course of an evening out, that adds up to 1-2 lost drink sales.

And also because a lot of people just can't get a job in the area they want. I know of a lot of people online that went for a degree in game design, but the jobs just aren't there. If they do get a job in the game industry, it's often as tester - bottom of the ladder.

>>If they do get a job in the game industry, it's often as tester - bottom of the ladder.

Uh, is it really that bad to start your career at a junior job?

Besides, graphics/game developers in my experience know a lot about math, algorithms and fast implementation. They should be able to get jobs somewhere else?

Those are programmers. People who followed a game design course often have 'good enough' skills in writing simple scripts and 3D modelling (judging by the CVs I've seen, anyway).

Ah, right you are. Everyone I know that did games are programmers, but they are a minority on the teams. :-)

Imagine this: you have no car, limiting your ability to travel to a job. You have only a high school degree, limiting your prospects. You have a child, limiting the times you can work. You have very few marketable skills, limiting the specificity of a possible job.

Do you think you'd have a whole lot of ability to be picky?

perfectly explained. By the time most people realize all the happenstances (er... personal requirements) necessary to be picky about the work they will perform, they have already made the decisions that have defined their potential work options.

There are the rare few that select service work over better paying work (CS/Engineering grads choosing to serve, bar-tend, barrista, etc. This is an accepted identity among people in Austin, TX and I'm sure other areas). Some of this may be under-performance, but I think it is more a respect for simplicity and a desire to appreciate life and people: they do it because the want to.

More often than not, service work is filled by people with a need for any job at all.

a) Because there aren't an unlimited number of jobs to choose from.

b) Employers are required to make up the difference if you don't make the real minimum wage (7.25) with your tips.

c) In practice, waiters do much better than the rest of the kitchen. I worked as waiter and kitchen staff for six years at a cheap buffet. Servers pulled $150 for a five hour shift, on average. Everybody in the kitchen made minimum wage.

Because otherwise you won't be able to eat or stay off the street?

Because it's hard to find other jobs. The free market doesn't always even things out. Sometimes, you just don't want to feel like you're broke and have no prospects, so you take the first job that you can get. And why shouldn't there be good, fair jobs available for people in that position?

I have a friend with a PhD who has been looking for work for 6 months. She needed to pay the bills and found a waitressing job in less than a week (from when she started looking to first day of work!).

Due to her education and experience she is probably in a much better position than people without those skills - even for a service industry job.

Yeah, I don't really understand that parent comment. Tipped jobs pay well, and don't really seem relevant in a "living wage" discussion.

Minimum wage jobs, on the other hand...

I wouldn't paint all tipped jobs with the same brush. I used to deliver pizza in high school. I got tips. I lived in a rural area and usually a "good" tip was $1.

I had zero choice for jobs. I competed with many other desperate kids for that job. In the end my choice was to leave the area, but I was smart and burdened with a teenage pregnancy or the massive family responsibilities of some of my peers.

True, when I think of a tipped job, I think of waitstaff and barstaff.

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