The social interaction dynamics that happens at the Google building is a reflection of society at large. As another example, I've worked at the offices of charity institutions where the higher level white collar workers ignore the cleaning people. The common theme is that humans in general (and not Google employees specifically) like to stratify people.

I recently flipped through a high school yearbook (these books were more popular before the era of Facebook) and noticed that the cafeteria ladies were relegated to a tiny group photo. However, the teachers got individual portraits. So a public institution funded by taxpayer money implicitly stratified 2 different types of workers. Each page of printing a hardcopy yearbook costs money and the food workers are not the same value to the yearbook staff. See the common pattern across humanity?

We ignore the people that actually feed us (farmers), and instead we focus all our energy on the people that feed us bullshit (Elon M.).

That's not a sign of being poor, it's a sign of not being an ass.

I'm not going to post my credentials on HN but I have it on good authority that these jobs suck enough without having to pretend to relate to your customer. Hello is fine but beyond that and the janitor probably has their shields up lest they say something stupid the same way a white collar professional would be very careful talking to Bill Gates.

You share the same space. How distant are you with other people that you can't just say hi? Does it matter if you don't discuss politics after it?

When i was a kid, i had to take the bus and i forgot my bus ticket (a pupil, on one bus stop, everyday, the same bus stop the same bus driver on a school route...) and he put a lot of energy into telling me off.

A few days/weeks later i thought about it and i also thought about why i'm not greeting my bus driver when i enter. I started to say hi. I liked it. I liked saying hi to my bus driver.

I forgot my bus ticket again. No issues no worries. there was mutual respect and that mutual respect came to acknowleding him.

I like greeting my neigbhours as well. Somehow it makes a small connection between us.

and yes i read the part with the shield: The first step is a hi. Every other step is easier not harder. Finding out their names, a little bit of talking about family and friends etc.

If i would have worked close enough to Bill Gates i probably would have talked to him sooner or later. Why not? He is a human, not like Mark Zuckerburg.

Every additional complaints about my life or happenings in my life that I would have would be unrelatable to the maids and the drivers at our house and it might make them feel uncomfortable.

No interest in learning who they are? What they like? When they have birthday?

If you have a bad day, for whatever reason, you think they couldn't relate to having a bad day?

They couldn't relate - my bad day would be related to losing a few points on a foreign exam or if my favorite restaurant was overbooked.

They shouldn't have to share our burden in addition to the work they are doing and potentially feel bad.

I worked in an Ivy League university while poor— and continued doing so for quite some time. I assure you that treating people in lower socioeconomic classes either as invisible or a mildly concerning presence, depending on the context, and coming from a wealthy, white background is closely correlated. Many of the wealthier students, faculty, and professional staff treated the cleaners, landscapers, catering staff and cafeteria workers like furniture. Of course, there were exceptions.

I saw a similar juxtaposition in tech, though the ratio of wealthy to non-wealthy wasn't as extreme as it was in an elite university.

Seriously, why wouldn't you talk to the janitor or anyone else? They're the reason you have a clean place to work. I never got the "nothing in common" routine either. They're people, with lives and families and wants and needs. Yeah, they're not spending their day banging their heads against their desks solving reference counting bugs, but they're working to support their lives as best they can.

Googler for many years here. I've never heard of this kind of thing. One of the most prolific and loved content creators on the internal meme board is in sales. The closest thing I've ever heard like this in the entire valley is that at Apple they don't pay for the lunch bill of non-engineers, so having premium lunch options can feel exclusive to engineers.

One of the most widely praised decisions Google made during the pandemic was to continue to pay their vendor staff who maintain the buildings even though there was no work to be done. And they kept that promise (as far as I can tell) for the entire process even though the initial expectation was that WFH would last for a few months.

My personal experience at Google has been that people do chat with vendor staff like custodial workers and kitchen staff.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/552403-google-childcar...

> Googler for many years here. I've never heard of this kind of thing.

Not a Googler myself, but from what I heard the divide isn't between engineering and non-engineering roles, but between Google employees and contractors (and that you can tell who is which by their badges).

Then you see the cleaning staff, and you're confronted with their reality, the fact that they have to do work that is both harder and potentially more useful than what you're doing but they don't get any of the benefits, and they get paid a fraction of what you do, and that just makes you feel even worse, like this entire system is somehow fundamentally broken, which makes you want to trow your ergonomic chair out of the unopenable glass window of your open space.

So it's easier to just look away.

Like there's an entire well known meme about rest and vest at Google. (Amazon and Netflix will bounce you though if rumors are true)

It's been true my entire life that every bracket of pay raise increase i've gotten has had a commensurate decrease in the amount of physical labor and mental exhaustion i would suffer. Going from minimum wage to 30k+ was a breath of fresh air. Going pass 100k was realizing you were living in a coal mine where everyone smoked and the 30k just meant you got to take clean air breaks every now and then. Of course then you have the attendant desperation in the US of "falling down" back to the level you were before and knowing the life style you live now can not possibly be sustained in those positions.

A simple mental exercise. When was the last time you had to ask permission to use the restroom at your place of employment?

One serious issue i've seen with alot of tech workers is that they have NO IDEA whats it's like to ever work minimum wage. They went from middle class existence to college to a tech job making more money than most people ever will. The minimum wage worker and even middle wage worker existence is invisible and nonsensical to them.

I worked at HQ as an engineer, and didn't notice any such thing.

Most of the time I probably didn't say hi to cleaning staff, for the same reason I wouldn't say hi to most of the people I pass by in the office: because they weren't someone I knew. Of course this might vary depending on context, but I was treating them the same way I treated everyone else, or at least trying to.

Do other people say hi to every single person you see in the building every day?

Yeah, pretty much.

I would argue that this has just nothing to do with poor/rich or where you work.

Perhaps its just random how your work environment or your collegues are.

So, sometimes, yeah.

I generally say hi to everyone as well, especially if I've made eye contact. At the very least, some kind of acknowledgement.

Many said that the old man and wife, who built the fortune, were nice humble people that understood that they are so lucky to have made it in life. Many comments also said that their children were absolute spoiled brats who were the exact opposite to humble.

in my experience, there is no difference in how poor or rich people behave towards low-level staff.

in general, my feeling is the rich are more friendly, but it may be less genuine

There is absolutely a difference in how rich and poor people treat poor service workers.

It's not that poor people treat them better per se but it's different. Poor people can be cruel to each other because they are all suffering, crab in a bucket shit.

Rich people mostly ignore poor people because visible poverty makes them uncomfortable so they look away. They hate themselves if they see our humanity so they try not to.

I've been on both sides of this and am speaking from painful experience in both cases.

It has to be amazing having such a simple world model. Or better yet, being able to know the deepest ideas and thoughts in other people's minds and to explain their behaviour.

Going back to seriousness, and leaving sit-com cliches aside, do you have any solid evidence about this? and when you say rich, could you give a ballpark of the money they have to have to be considered rich? Because poor people in US would have better living conditions than in other countries in Europe, for example.

You, or someone else, will move the goalposts, or find some hyper specific counterexample and claim it disproves the entire thing. Or claim that the poor aren't poor enough, or someone else somewhere has it worse so their misery can't be real.

It's based on my experiences and there's no bibliography for my life. I explained the experiences and why I think they're relevant. If it doesn't work for you then it doesn't.

From experience in similar conversations I expect this to be taken as a refusal to argue in good faith. The thing is though I don't want to argue. I said what I said and I stand by it. I have nothing to add.

This isn't true at all.