Follow the money.

I'm always asking myself "what does this author have to gain from writing this, or holding that position?" It can happen that there is absolutely no financial motive, many times it's pure greed but often it's on a continuum that's a mix of both profit and helping people out.

As an example it's common to find articles about technical problem and how {{top-organization}} solved it with {{state-of-the-art}} solution. The last paragraph is "oh by the way, we're hiring". While there's a profit motive in this form of content marketing, there's also genuine help being passed along.

Business recommendations tend to be a bit more skewed towards the profit side, and financial recommendations… well those are a class of their own.

A health dose of suspicion goes a long way to sort out the BS.

What they can gain is in the ego as well. Though I 100% agree, always follow the money. But never underestimate how often things are written with the purpose of saying "look how great I am, you should envy me."

> > > it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog

They aren't aware of the fog, they have the same subconscious biased perspective that makes the fog look like normal to them.

For me, the weirdest part is the way in which the upper-middle class people I now associate and work with talk about "my people" (i.e. the working-class folks I grew up with). They mythologize them as the noble, hard-working, salt of the earth, when in reality, they clearly don't like most of their habits, their religion, their tastes, their opinions, their language, or much else about them. Poor and working-class people are described in archetypes, stereotypes, and as abstract ideas. But very little said matches what I know about actual poor people. They are always -- always -- praised when spoken of in the abstract. But when the conversation drifts toward the specific, it's pretty clear that they're not really big fans.

I find myself simultaneously defending the behaviors of the working class while also walking upper-class liberals back a few steps on just how noble and hard-working -- they're always described as hard-working -- most actual poor people really are. They're just people.

We've been idealizing rural / commoner folk for a while. IIRC, French nobility in the 18th or 19th century had the habit of running out to the country and playacting as peasants for fun.

Not to mention there's a glut of 'rural/blue collar porn', (Duck Dynasty, etc) or at least there was a few years back. Some of that maybe people watched condescendingly but there could also be the tendency of portraying these folks as knowing something others do not.

There's a glut of "urban white collar porn": Nearly all mainstream television sitcoms and dramas.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/08/here_c...

I don't disagree about urban white collar porn (sitcoms, dramas, sure but all those house hunting shows too) but neither of these were the main thrust of my comment.

If anything it's coded language for 'working hard is a great way to end up poor'.

PS: Consider all the "hardworking" people here on HN. Yes, long hours may be expected, but effort has little direct benefit.

They're just people. When the upper-classes talk about the poor as all good or all bad it's always in the context of selling you their politics.

Tell me more, please.

You can imagine how scary it is to read all the super tough questions, going to the whiteboard, having to discuss passion projects, needing a solid github profile, knowing algorithms, data structures, strange math, and on and on.

You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code.

It's like if you were trying to evaluate the average math proficiency of the population by only reading blog posts about math. It would seem like everyone really knew math! Except of course, the only people who blog about math are the few that are into it. They're not bullshitting, they're just overrepresented.

Not that I disagree with your original point, by the way; BS is rampant.

I agree with this. I have interviewed a good amount of engineers, both as a SWE at Google as well as founder of my own company. From that experience I can tell that the only thing that asking mostly hard interview questions does is reducing your candidate pool to 0.

Even with mostly moderately hard questions your candidate pool at the end of the funnel is probably going to be around 5% to 10% as compared to the start of the funnel. Plus after a certain level of question difficulty as an employer you're probably optimizing for the wrong skillset.

Perhaps for super competitive positions, e.g. for algorithmic trading at reputable Wall Street hedge funds, there's a place for killer interview questions but it's definitely not the bread and butter.

Spending 2 years learning how to interview when you could have been spending 1.96 years getting passably good at something and 2 weeks on interviewing is madness, though.

Meaning that people making $10 per hours use more or less coarse language than people making $50 per hour?

In upper class, the language probably has more "fucks per minute," but there is a fluid dance that moves between honesty and somewhere else. Any compliment like "a great conversation" or "I like your clothes" is on a continuum rather than a discrete statement.

That's a simple example, but everything sort of falls along these lines, and it's exhausting to parse it all.

This experience isn't exactly uncommon.

Everyone who had a job during college in a state with a single digit minimum wage then got an entry level tech job in a high CoL area did this.

That said, most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder when they do that which I think is what you were getting at.

The college kids with work-study jobs in the kitchen, get financial aid, furnish their living spaces with office furniture the school discarded, and whatnot are the ones who move into a different social class when they enter the workforce.

I think we're agreeing here.

If your assumptions/situation match those of the author/speaker---it will be good advice. If they don't---bullshit.

This CANNOT be over stated. If it matches your own view you have to be even more wary of it than if it doesn't match your own view. If it fits in your own narrative then you want it to be true. If it doesn't fit then you don't want it to be true.

Always consider your own bias. Does it provoke a strong emotion in you?

you will find that the answer is never "mine" when reading something you didn't write, but it might sometimes be "theirs, and mine" if you are reading something that is not bullshit.

advanced techniques include making finer distinctions in your answer to the question. but the question is all you really need.

then there's what i call the "10 year old" rule of thumb.

if a 10 year old of average cleverness wanted to manipulate their parents into an action by repeating the claims that you read, would their rhetoric be similar to the claims that you suspect are bullshit?

remember, just like adults, 10 year olds add a lot of noise to their manipulative signals but they aren't very good at subterfuge because they can't disguise their intent despite adding noise. this thought experiment is for getting you to read between the lines rather than reading the lines literally and accepting them as truth-- as the ten year old desperately wants you to do so that their trick is a success.

this thought experiment is enough to resolve almost every tough call of "is it bullshit or not" when other methods fail. don't make this one into a habit, keep it handy for conscious mulling over of tough cases of ambiguous intentions. and don't share it, some 10 year olds are smart enough to know this trick already and they might get offended.

Better form your own set of core non-bullshit beliefs and work from that.

What? This is just child abuse. Please expand on what circumstances in which this considered OK?

Now, it's true that there are further meaningful intent-based distinctions you can make within the broad category of abuse, but that's somewhat beside the point.

That doesn't sound correct to me. If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely, and the small pain is far less severe and more transient than the great and lasting pain of a nasty burn.

Enjoying inflicting pain is definitely abuse, but inflicting it to prevent worse pain and suffering is IMHO not.

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/29/new-york-city-mayor-1...

No, you don't; if they are well below the age of reason, they are well below the age at which they will connect the hit with the reason for it.

That's why you don't let kids that young around a stove in the first place, and if they do get loose around one, you restrain and remove them. This may involve incidental pain, but not intentional, instrumental pain.

Not trying to detract from your overall point, just thought it was worth noting.