Classist wage disparity is a real problem in America today. Often knowledge workers who don't work hard earn more than physical workers who do work hard.
earnings are measured with productivity, and knowledge work has more scaling to their productivity output. You can dig holes really hard, but a hole dug is a hole dug. A line of code written is not just a line of code, as power of compounding output stacks on top of each other.
I probably should have used the phrase "unskilled work" in my original post, but I was trying to convey the person's frustrations about "hard work." From an outsiders perspective, a skilled knowledge worker doesn't look like they're working very hard, but we know that's not true.
Those people are only serving us the food we need to live.
After a certain point, programming becomes less hard. It becomes a set of very familiar syntax snippets to copy/paste around.
Rushing around a kitchen in the heat, and often toxic, juvenile environment all week never changes… versus programming in your house?
Give me a break. You’re not coming close to putting the same real pressure on your body.
Programming can be copy/paste, but the hard days when you have to figure out how to eliminate some mutex across some threads so the whole performs without a race condition - that will always be hard.
- 20 years of work
- x years of study
- being born with the right nature/nurture mix for computer work
…to get to this point. That’s a very significant initial hump in difficulty that restaurant work doesn’t have.
Go work 20 years of Friday and Saturday nights in a popular restaurant. Does not have to be the same one, as the expectation is the same.
The level of effort I need to put into coding dropped off exponentially.
As one ages the level of effort out into restaurant work goes up.
Let’s rely on science and not bias. Programming is still not sweatshop work on the regular. I work 4 solid hours a day.
Why isn’t there a flood of ex-restaurant workers becoming software engineers? Because getting over that hump is really hard, statistically speaking.
I've worked in a factory as a machine operator, and in a company as a programmer, and they're not comparable in either difficulty or compensation.
people with engineering degree struggle to find job as SE.
let alone that you need to put hundreds/thousands of hours into it in your free time
and then still learn a lot as dev in order to move up
i'm not saying that it makes SE harder, just different.
Knowledge work does look different from physical work, but you can work hard at both; you need to work hard at either to be successful.
As for why hard physical work is so valued - only a century or two past, it was the only practical method to prevent the starvation for yourself and your family. Knowledge work being a viable means of survival (for non-nobles) is pretty new, all things considered.
Even my own parents never really understood how knowledge work could be as valuable as getting out and working with your hands; and they were born in the early/mid 1900's.