Not that it's a realistic idea but damn if everyone had experiencing working in the demanding, underpaid, crappy jobs in the service industry, we might be more empathetic and better off as a whole.

Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll understand just how trying it can be to struggle with lousy software on top of a sometimes difficult public. You'll know the trouble spots and the workarounds, and can take that education back to a nice safe quiet desk where you can then go on to help solve the problems.

I was constantly asking our designers and PMs to try using our product as a user might. I'd write up little scenarios that I knew our users struggled with and invite people to try them out with our product.

Sadly, I found it impossible to persuade anybody to design for anything except what looks good on a presentation of UX mocks.

But I'll be able to understand their job better and what the software really needs to do to make than more efficient and productive. They'll appreciate that and be more likely to buy in and adapt to the product they'll be using.

That's not your job. Your job is to implement the features you're told to implement.

But the users saw those features and said that is not what they asked for.

So? Why do you care if the project fails? It's not on you if it fails. Just do what the BA's said to do.

Boss, they aren't translating the business needs correctly. We have to rebuild features 2 or 3 or 4 times. Is we could see what they do and talk to them it'd only take once. That's happened a couple times during user acceptance. They said that's not what what we asked for. I said what did you ask for? I coded it right there on the spot and they signed off on the user story.

Go back to work. I'm busy. This isn't a productive conversation.

Imho that's trying to solve a symptom, not the actual problem.

Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$?

Instead, it somehow has become completely normalized that these kinds of jobs exist, and anybody who doesn't want to work them is considered "too entitled", which all goes back to this notion of "work as a virtue".

And while the idea that this experience might help change something from the desk job, the reality is most people will just be glad to be having their desk job, with a lot having a mindset of "I went through the &^%$ jobs to get here, everybody else should have to suffer like I did!".

We do strive, which is why we have non-shit jobs now. After the advent of agriculture, overwhelming majority of people has worked mundane, tiring, repetitive and straining jobs. It’s only recent increases in technology allowed us to produce immense amounts of wealth, finally allowing huge swaths of population to enjoy light, interesting and fun jobs. We still have lots of shit jobs out there, but don’t worry, we’re working on that.

Service and social jobs are usually those "closest to the base", being in constant contact with people from all walks of life, while at the same time usually the least well paid.

That's a lot of exposure compared to many other jobs, in particular, desk jobs and pretty much most management and executive positions.

Imho the importance of such real in flesh contact to other people, across peer groups, is vastly underestimated these days.

The ever-present social media gives digitally affine people often the misleading idea they can find everybody, with all their issues and opinions, online but from my experience that just holds not true.

There's plenty of people out there that don't even know what Facebook is, as unbelievable as that might sound.

Slowly the org transitions to much higher paid people in these roles across the board.

I think part of it is mgmt types think they save money reducing wages for the most numerous type of employee and it creates a black hole race to the bottom.

High end restaurants have very well paid front of house because they have a financial incentive to perform. Cashiers don't.

Can you point to any point in human history (since the invention of farming) in which a smaller fraction of people worked menial jobs than now?

There are tons and tons of bullshit jobs that don't produce anything valuable, don't fulfill anyones need to have a meaningful life, but somehow keep butts in seats often at keyboards getting paid to justify someone elses jobs existence.

There is a reason why job satisfaction is abysmal, why depression and opioid abuse is rampant, and why those weren't as large problems two centuries ago when people were almost universally subsistence farmers. The labor wasn't easy but it always justified itself to those doing the work (assuming it was your own farm, growing your own food, which was and has always been pretty rare). You knew why it had to be done, something lacking in many modern careers.

E.g. flipping burgers at McDonald's isn't a shitty job because you're flipping burgers; it's a shitty job because you are paid badly, made to work much faster than it's healthy, and the management is shitty to you both personally and structurally, in how they plan the shifts, etc.

I'd argue that any shitty job could have a non-shitty variant with mostly the same tasks and responsibilities, and only the conditions changed. Which leads me to the answer to your question: anywhere between invention of agriculture and the industrial revolution, or perhaps even up to XIX century. Even when people toiled on farms, to then give most of it away to some nobles with swords, at least they weren't micromanaged day-in, day-out by said nobles.

One step up, the corporate managers putting the pressure on the local managers are themselves pressured by market conditions to cut cost and drive efficiency. And who drives those market conditions? You and I, my friend. We like cheap stuff. The consequence is that others suffer.

I worked on a farm throwing hay. It’s literally backbreaking work, but I had an awesome employer who thought about safety and making for a better workplace. If Amazon were running that farm, I’d be crippled by debilitating pain today.

They can be low / lower pay and still be a fairly reasonable place to work with fairly reasonable people to work with.

But, if we accept that work conditions fit some kind of natural distribution / bell curve, it's probably unrealistic to believe there will be no shit jobs.

I simply look at eBay and see the $200-$400 price tags to replace my current machine (10-year old ThinkPad T400) and try not to cry. (This one was given to me by a friend)

I found an 800MHz AMD Duron with 128MB RAM on the side of the road in 2013. Browsing the web on that box was fun, even after maxing out the RAM with everything in the house and getting it up to 320MB.

In 2005 I was running a 66MHz 486DX2 with 8MB of free diskspace (oh and 4MB RAM).

The outlier was the Pentium 4 I used for a bit in 2006 - it had a crippled motherboard that couldn't do DMA to the HDD, only PIO, so the cursor would freeze if anything was accessing the HDD even for a fraction of a second. This was the Firefox 2.x era, so with 512MB of RAM I was mostly staring at "Task Manager (Not Responding)" instead of doing anything useful.

My point with all this: it has taken me about 20 years to realize that my general lack of success at mastering computer science wasn't entirely due to the learning difficulties and other mental health issues preventing me from holding down a traditional job - it was access to sane equipment.

I have had the ABSOLUTE HARDEST TIME EVER (emphasis appropriate and necessary) to FORCE myself to do ANYTHING with computers beyond what I'd describe "theoretical learning". "But what if I start this project and the computer dies tomorrow?????" is what a part of my head sort of screams/cries out anytime I have a new idea (with that many anxious questionmarks).

Unresolvable problem, currently. And an interesting one, too, since if I _could_ start a project, and hold it together, I might actually be able to get somewhere and move up.

...Except for the fact that the disability support I'm currently eligible for only recognizes casual/part time work payment structures, not bulk post-payment consulting/bug-bounty up-front types of remuneration, which is the type of thing I have any confidence in my abilities with. (Since I can cram and do the work in a sprint, then run away and have a break for a million years afterwards.)

So yeah, I am practically disabled because of how my mental health issues are classified, not directly because of the issues themselves (which have an impact but do leave me with some level of functionality which I am unable to effectively use).

That probabbly explains why there are such great free development tools out there too ;)

* empathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

* sympathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy

Same should apply for software as well imo.

It seems to me like it used to be a lot more common for people to take up a "shitty" (e.g., low paying, menial, and hard) job when they were young, to help pay their way through school, for some extra pocket money, etc. You would do this during the summers, or part-time, or both. This was just considered an ordinary part of life and a character building experience.

It seems like this experience is a lot less common now. In part because we're coddling our children and our young adults (hard work increasingly seems to be a dirty word and something no one should ever have to do), in part because we're handing off all the worst jobs to illegal immigrant labor.

I'm sure this will prompt some "ok boomer" type responses (I'm not that old btw) but that's just how it was when and where I grew up. I was expected to work and make money as soon as I was able, because my family wasn't rich. They were also super clear with me that there was no free rent after I turned 18, and that if I wanted to go to college I needed to pay for it myself. So this fantasy land "we'll have only perfect jobs for everyone and work will always be a fulfilling endeavor" crap does not connect with me and I suspect does not connect with 90% of Americans. It is popular with techno-fantasists who went to Stanford and work in SV and drink the kool-aid from their employer about how they are changing the world by optimizing the profitability of some billionaire's advertising inventory.

(None of this is to suggest that Cierra Brown's situation is fine and we don't need to change anything about the system btw! Biggest practical issues I saw in that article were that she doesn't have healthcare and she walks away from 2 weeks of work with only $215, something is very wrong there.)

When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance.

Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though.

When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people.

If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.

You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap.

The immigrant is not at fault. It seems like you're responding to Fox News talking points, not to me. I would suggest doing that on foxnews.com.

At no point did I suggest that better labor standards are a bad idea, but I did observe that anyone who thinks society will eliminate all the jobs Hacker News perceives as shitty is drinking a lot of kool-aid.

Don't blame the American who doesn't want to do back-breaking work for pennies. It's the same everywhere: for example, Finland imports seasonal berry pickers from Thailand.

No sane local wants to work on the rates the market is willing to pay; mechanised agriculture has pushed the prices low enough to make manual agricultural work simply unsustainable. To make local work profitable we'd need to radically raise the product prices or provide subsidies.

These problems can be solved in other ways. A real world solution probably involves some workers getting paid less than they would like, and some businesses paying higher wages than they want to.

The least moral solution is to develop an illegal underclass and deny them human and political rights. This sort of thing is cancerous for a democracy and bears an unsettling resemblance to one of America's original sins, one which I'm sure I don't need to name directly, but which we knew was wrong from day one, and which we spent a lot of blood and treasure to abolish.

I'm not sure how to react to cases where this is true but the seasonal workers still see it as a good source of income. Would the market bear the increased cost? Likely not. Avocados would be imported in the US, and in Finland berries would disappear as an industry ingredient as there are no low-cost countries with climate suitable for cultivation.

Agreed. When I worked retail and waiting jobs, I got grief from both out-of-touch wealthy people, and bitter poor people (although there were also kind people from both of those categories).

Myself, and I suspect most people, I got grief from everyone.

Poor.

Middle Class.

Wealthy.

Those with accents.

Those without accents.

White.

Black.

Tall.

Short.

You name it. It's brutal if you have to work such jobs for a long time. (Like say, throughout high school and college.) A lot of people out there turn terrible as soon as they interact someone of lower status providing them a service. Even if you never make a mistake, you can't escape it. I remember a girl spilled a drink on the dress of some woman. Apparently the table was already bad, and it turned worse. Manager made me take the table. (Not proud about it, but I was the best doormat he had.) I don't even remember the rest of the night, but I remember that table. Remember every face. They didn't even look like bad people either. That's what was so surprising. Man, that has stayed with me.

So if you only got grief from a few people, then you should thank your lucky stars. You got off easy.

- "you were lucky."

- "thank your lucky stars"

- "You got off easy"

- "It's brutal if you have to work such jobs for a long time"

I worked retail, bused tables, and waited for almost 3 years full-time, and I'm certainly not claiming to have only gotten grief from a few people. I never said anything even remotely close to "few people" in my comment. I suggested that there was a trend to the people I got grief from, in agreement to the GP comment. Note: a trend, not an absolute cut-off.

In addition to the comment I was responding to, there are other comments in this thread making similar assertions, so I'm not the outlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717225

Good point, it explains why well-traveled people often end up being insufferable racists.

On the other hand Sony Japan apparently has a policy where new employees fresh out of college (vs employees with previous work experience) are made to work 2 weeks in retail at an electronic store to get a taste of what it's like for actual customers. I ask some employees if they got any thing useful out of the experience. Most said no, it was just like getting hazed.

My local store had a good sale on 12-packs of soda and so I decided to stock up with a dozen packs (I like a variety). I loaded them into my cart upside-down so the barcodes were facing up. The cashier just had to take the hand scanner and zap each one super easy and didn't have to lift any of them. It saved both of us time and effort and the cashier was extremely appreciative.

That said, if I could get a retail job that paid what I make as a dev, I’d definitely consider it. Retail was grueling, but at the same time much less psychological pressure, and much less mentally exhausting.

I always say I’m not going to let my next dev job take over my life, and maintain work/life balance, and things always start out well. But inevitably, pressure builds, I cave, and things get bad again. I realize that I share the blame for this situation, but at the same time, this situation seems to be more common than not among software devs.

I never faced this kind of pressure in retail jobs. Work was grueling and at time abusive, but when the work day was over, I was 100% able to relax and forget about work. I struggle to do that with a software job.

But at the same time, my compensation is considerably higher than most other jobs. So I’m both grateful for my job and yet still wish there were another way. Like a part-time software development job, which seem to be unusually rare.

To some degree, serving the "customer" by cutting labour costs to the bare minimum (as a way to minimize the cost of everything), means we create an awful existence for the people who depend on these jobs for a living. The tyranny of their lives is dictated by a consumer base who constantly demand lower prices and will shop elsewhere to save a dollar or two.

I worked in a supermarket for four years, but it was part time, while I was in High School and in my first year of University. I didn't need the money in the way someone working full time needed it. I was given consistent hours every week.

Working retail for a modest wage (say $25 an hour), with consistent hours would be a really great career for a huge swathe of the population. Lots of people (myself included) enjoy interacting with people all day.

A lot of more traditional professions have a better balance between physical work and mental work (skilled crafts, engineering in the traditional sense, or being a doctor all come to mind). Modern knowledge work doesn't have enough physical movement involved.

I wouldn't like to do it full time, but sometimes I wish I could spend 20% of my time doing something enjoyable but menial like stacking shelves. I think I'd hate doing it full time, but one day a week? Practically sounds like fun!

* not having to cut labor to the minimum as a basic value

* sooo many jobs would be unobjectionable at 8 hours per week. Almost any job.

* professions should be designed to balance physical and mental labor, particularly to offer breaks from painful standing.

I am not with you on:

* Giving people 167% of the average hourly wage for an easy job like retail. As a society, we do not _want_ retail to be a great career. You don't develop the job skills or provide the same value as jobs that are more challenging, and the more valuable things you could have produced are lost. Retail should pay less than other jobs, _because_ it's more fun to interact with people all day than to work at a hot grill.

When you are that poor, you need every hour of work you can get to make rent, buy food etc. You can't take time off to interview for a better job, or to study for a new career. You are stressed from a thousand extra decisions about money that the cushion of a little extra cash could save you. Also you are one emergency or injury or illness away from losing your apartment, or going hungry.

That's why advocates call for a living wage, a wage that people can make enough to live on. If they have the capability to do more, then that gives them a better chance to achieve it.

Though there will still need to be people working retail.

As for how fun it is to interact with people... that definitely depends on who you are and who you are interacting with. If you know someone working retail, ask them how it is.

Broadly, as a society, we want people to have jobs that pay them enough to survive, and with enough margin to do other stuff. Not everything can (or should) tie back to economic value. Otherwise we end up cutting off our noses to spite our own faces, as we focus on the short term rather than the long term health of a wider community.

More than anything, we want to reward diligence, professionalism and effort, in whatever form that might take.

Part of the reason software jobs are nice and comfortable is of course the pay and the agency, both coming from demand exceeding supply. But a big part of it is also, IMO, that it's impossible to tell how much contribution to the bottomline a developer has on a day-to-day, or hour-to-hour basis. When my coworker and I start talking shit on the job, does that contribute positively or negatively to the ultimate productivity? By how much? Nobody can tell, which is why we can get away with it.

Conversely, in retail or fast-food joints, you can track people's contribution to the bottom line at minute resolution. Which is why they're being treated like slave labor.

And everyone needs to shop. Retail isn't just interacting with people all day: You are filing shelves. Sometimes you are a pharmacist or a pharmacy tech. Sometimes you are doing payroll or managing. Sometimes you are ordering product.

You are also cleaning up the shit someone smeared on the wall of the bathroom and the puke the kid left in the isle. There is no real way around that.

Not everyone thinks it is more fun to interact with people all day long. I'd argue that most factory work - lots of which is paid fairly well, comparatively - takes no more intelligence or training or knowledge than retail. In both, once you have experience, you can get another job. Same for call centers... which again, are usually paid better than retail or fast food (yet still treated poorly). I don't know why retail should pay less than these sorts of jobs. Most folks just wind up with retail jobs because that's what they started with and it is hard to get out of the cycle.

I don't like interacting with people but it is way more cushy than the factory work I did for fifteen years. I guess you're right about not taking more intelligence or training, but it takes so much more physical stamina and risk of accident.

Most folks don't do retail for fun. Those that do will also do a number of other part-time jobs for fun or whatever reason. Most folks working retail, though, are doing it to eat and pay rent. Sometimes having a flexible schedule is necessary. A great number of places have chances to move into management, sometimes moving out of poverty wages.

None of this means the folks aren't ambitious or motivated. You simply don't recognise it as such because they are doing what you consider to be a "lower" job or not doing enough to meet your personal criteria.

I will grant you that selling garden soil might be as physically demanding as working in a factory, and miles walked could add up too. But I never woke up in retail wondering if I'd be physically able to continue working my job much longer because of the wear and tear.

There's a reason every rich country got there by manufacturing and not retail, and in part it's that you don't build human capital by sitting in a chair scanning price tags. Manufacturing productivity increases steadily so workers have to become steadily more skillful to keep up. It's also far from a dead-end job, as productivity is easily measured and the cream can rise.

People in retail can be ambitious and talented, but their talents are wasted there. We can't get every ambitious, motivated person out of retail and into the job where they would do the most good just by offering them money, because money isn't everything. But we can avoid screwing things up by _pushing_ those people into jobs where their talents are wasted, by offering them too much money. I've worked lots of mandatory overtime because people wouldn't come work for my employer, so I feel the pain of jobs that need good people but can't get them.

Your response screams, "I've never worked a retail job in my life!!". There's nothing easy about working retail in the United States, and interacting with the majority of retail customers is far from "fun".

I'm a CS student and I've been working at a Panera for about a year now. I love my particular store and the work environment is great; I genuinely look forward to going to work every day. I'll miss my coworkers when I have to quit soon to start my programming career.

That being said, I understand why those jobs could never realistically pay anything near what a good software dev job can. If you could make the same amount of money working a job like that, why would anyone put in the effort to get stressed out as a programmer? It wouldn't make sense.

The solution is to fix dev jobs so they're more balanced and less stressful :)

If I could work the ride op or fast food jobs at my current salary, I'd take them in a heart beat. Hell, I might even take the ride op job for half the salary because the job could sometimes be a lot of fun.

But retail? Hell no. You could offer me double my salary and I'd still hesitate before accepting it. People treat retail employees like utter garbage. We once had a customer berate a cashier to tears, yelling at her and literally calling her an "incompetent stupid bitch", because his credit card was being declined and he was insisting she was just entering his card wrong.

It was a blast.

No complaints, I actually enjoyed the work, but it was exhausting in a way that no office job can compare. The experience also makes me want to throttle folks who have never lifted anything heavier than a pen as I hear them whine about utter trivial things.

I don't, because it is considered rude to throttle one's co-workers.

The urge remains.

Just because your work isn’t as grueling as someone else’s doesn’t mean you don’t get to be unhappy or dissatisfied with it.

Having a wider perspective leads to a greater appreciation for what one has, after all. And that is a good thing.

To get more money you have to pry it from people's hands. You have to have something they can't resist not paying you for. That's it.

The suffering of low minimum wage is supposed to "encourage" people to move up the value chain, as the conservative doctrine goes, but it just doesn't work when all your time and energy is spent surviving.

Another bad thing about those types of jobs is that they can start to warp your mind after a while, to the effect that you start unconsciously considering your superiors / managers as role models, and start trying to 'move up the ladder' because the pay is marginally better, when in reality most of the time the _top_ of the "ladder" at such organizations are compensated less than entry-level positions for in-demand skilled workers --

I've been continuously employed [out of what I _thought_ was necessity] since I was 16, and until I was about 26 the majority of my jobs were in the foodservice / warehouse / gofer / etc hard-work-long-hours-very-low-pay category. If I had to do over again, I would have stayed away from those situations by any means available and used that time to build valuable skills [as I later did], which would almost certainly have resulted in better outcomes, sooner.

Hard work leads to prosperity. That's not the same as equating prosperity to hard work.

Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)

Clearly, the 'value chain', as you put it, exists as evidenced by the numerous posts on this thread of describing the previous fast-food-type jobs they held that led them to more 'prosperous' positions (at least, affording enough prosperity to spend time posting messages to the internet instead of digging ditches or flipping burgers.)

Sometimes it does. Other times, it's barely enough to achieve survival.

> Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)

Or their distant ancestors. Or due to their -- or their ancestors' -- criminal activities or exploitative behavior or sheer luck.

Every single office job I've had, except my first (which was a data entry job, not programming), has been a lot more stressful a lot more often, and I'm including the job where the first thing my coworkers and I did each morning was play a video game to determine who was going to go pick up coffee (Carcassonne on Xbox Live Arcade, if you're curious, took about 20 minutes).

And this is true whether your folks won the lottery or earned their money through hard work.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/study-to-succeed-in-america-...

This part wasn't in your link, I don't believe this is true.

Any guesses on when the people working hard at a fast food restaurant will have prosperity arrive?

Honestly, I only made it out (I was probabbly not going to make it through college due to all the work and my own personality when I was young was NOT ready for college) because I got lucky, had some mild technical skills and the .com era came along and companies wanted warm bodies.

I picked some aged old company and they hired me. That company stuck around for a long enough time to establish a career.

Working pizza ... could easily have kept me down due to that and other challenges.

Now I work in an office. It's nothing to go 4-6 hours without stopping. But of course I can stop and pop out for a coffee or a snack, or lunch whenever I want.

$4 extra an hour would change this woman's life (and a lot of other people like her). $4 extra an hour.. I don't think I'd notice it.

Many of us are SO SO fortunate, we can't even begin to imagine how good we have it.

I worked at gas stations after that, before college, and while it was tiring, nothing at the same level.

I can totally imagine a pizza job would be draining.

At the end of the day you just want a room temperature shower and a cold drink, the mental capacity isn't really there for much else.

This is why I feel so much for those building the stadiums for the next football(/soccer) world cup. What's even worse is they're being worked to death as slaves in all but name.

If you don't have enough downtime/nutrition to recover between shifts you slowly fall apart.

He does have the relative security that comes with having a long term partner that does make a professional salary, but I don't think that diminishes the motivational piece. Not everyone is as ambitious as every one else. Of those that are, not everyone's ambition is pointed in the same direction. Some people just want to rock up at work for 8 hours a day, go home, watch some shit TV that they enjoy and then go to bed. Frankly, that's ok. There's not enough programmer/marketing professional/CEO/Founder roles for everyone to have them.

Hard work is relative and people are working very hard at all salary levels. There are many other constructs which are the true reasons behind how much people earn.

I agree with the Fight for $15... But I think they need to attach this to inflation or somehow as a percentage of the highest incomes in the economy. Otherwise Trump will just keep pressuring the Fed to print more money and $15 will only be worth $5 in today's money.