I'm not sure if that says more about the workers or your requirements. By 'work hard' you can only mean 'performing hours of tedious unthinking labour' if you're saying 'flipping burgers' is relevant and necessary to 'working hard'. The qualities just don't seem to match up for a job that requires real, rigorous, logical thinking, except for selecting out anyone incapable of the bare minimum effort to sort of just survive in the workplace. That's fair, but doesn't really map to what I commonly see which is a lot of wasted potential being consumed by menial labour because 'just doing it' is seen as more important than developing genuinely useful new approaches.

This comment reflects a pretentious disdain that is exactly what I dislike. I have worked menial and frustrating jobs, and you learn a lot by working through tough situations. I’ve also absorbed similar lessons from sailing offshore in difficult conditions.

Sailing offshore in difficult conditions sounds much more interesting and skillful than any amount of entry-level hospitality. Anyway, of course I have no 'disdain' for working menial jobs - I have worked in them too, I just don't really view them as anything particularly positive, and certainly for me they were formative only insofar as they provided major motivations for completing my degree so I could escape them.

I think you probably learned a lot more from those menial jobs than you realize. People who never did that kind of job often lack empathy for blue-collar workers; I used to work with one engineer who didn’t care whether production staff got laid off because our project was late (whereas others believed we had a duty to our co-workers). You also either demonstrated or developed an ability to cope with working on tasks that were tough, uninteresting and monotonous; many white-collar workers expect work to always be fun, with constant positive reinforcement, variety, and no failure (like school).

You learn the second lesson from sailing, but not the first.

I worked with a QA who used to be a cook. He was unstoppable.