If a teacher was telling you they’re exhausted from work would you smugly point out that ditch diggers have it harder? Physical labor and non-physical labor can both be demanding work, it’s not a competition and you’re not doing the physical laborer a favor by denigrating other people’s work.

Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to only have jobs with high pay, low stress, and good work life balance, but I’m sure you’ve seen enough tech burnout stories to know that tech jobs are not always easy. The factory worker and the engineer have vastly more in common with each other than they do with Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Neumann.

Implying that people can't be hard working because "look, there's this other job that seems like it's harder" is just... I don't even know what.

As for the struggling part, if you control for cost of living the picture is going to look a lot different.

Incidence rates (per 100 full-time worker equivalents) of nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses by industry and case types, cases with days away from work, 2019 [0]

Fishing? 3.0 Bituminous coal underground mining? 3.0

Framing contractors? 4.5 Soft drink manufacturing? 4.8

Leather and hide tanning and finishing? 7.1

Computer systems design and related services? 0.1

Fatal injury rates fall along the same lines [1], and programmers commit suicide at less than 1/2 the rate of high risk occupations [2].

There's a difference between going home mentally exhausted, and being unable to go into work because your body is that injured.

Or to put it another way: if you were offered your equivalent salary, would you go fish Alaskan king crab or join a logging crew tomorrow?

[0] https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/summ1_00.htm (Table 1) https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/case/cd_r4_2019.htm (Table R4)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cftb0332.htm (Table A-5, Fatal incident counts by occupation) https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju... (Occupations with the highest rates)

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6903a1-H.pdf (Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation, 2016)

I don't know that "hard-working" has generally been used to mean "working at hard physical labor". I have not been hard-working in that sense since the age of about twenty, the occasional home or volunteer project excepted.

Having said that, would you settle for "diligent"?

I struggle to find a term that allows for an equality between what I do on a daily basis, and what a fisherman does. Somehow, 'different but equal in effort' just doesn't seem accurate.

Which isn't to say that we aren't putting in work, or doing our best, or burning the candle, or creating amazing things.

You can do all of those things, and still not have as difficult a job as someone else. Because all work isn't the same.

And so I take a chunk of umbrage at whinging about the unfairness that we make so little while doing so much. "... struggle through and at best maybe make a decent living..." is a pretty damned entitled way to see the world.

Difficulty of a job is probably viewed differently from person to person also. I've done both programming and commercial fishing and I'd say they take different types of effort. Depending on the fishery, you could have a few months with lots of intense physical work and not much sleep, but the plus side is you get to work out on the ocean in a beautiful environment and you can travel around and not work for the rest of the year. One tech job I had, I was on call 24/7 with hours of commuting each day and it was very stressful and mentally tiring in my experience.

Hard-working (i.e. working hard) does not exclusively mean "working at hard physical labor". You are not insane.

It is a logical fallacy known as Relative Privation: https://academy4sc.org/video/fallacy-of-relative-privation-a...

By this token most of the tertiary sector can't be hard working and struggling, which would be more than 2/3 of the workers.

We'd also have to exclude all the workers that aren't in abusive conditions, like self owned artisan shops, plumbers etc. And exclude gig economy workers who don't literally work themselves to death and only work "a lot" for little pay.

You might be right, but the slice left is so small I am not sure it's a useful distinction in most conversations. Perhaps qualifying ditch digging and coal mining as "extreme working" and "hardcore struggling" would be a better fit.

I think ethbr0 was kind of dividing it into 3 categories:

People with it easy: 2.5x median and working in an office, which includes programmers

People with it hard: making little and doing backbreaking labor

People with it medium: everyone else

So we shouldn't say people in the easy category are struggling, and for perspective we should think about people in the hard category. But we can't say one way or the other about people in the medium category.

To quantify it, I guess it's the ratio of (physical or mental discomfort) to (compensation) that I'm talking about.

I wouldn't say programmers have exceptionally high mental discomfort; we certainly don't have high physical discomfort. And we're well compensated, relatively speaking.

In contrast, we have oil field workers(?): uncomfortable physical and mental work, but well compensated. Or meat processors: uncomfortable physical and mental work, poorly compensated.

By that metric, it seems like we're doing pretty well.

That may hold true for US (and even then there's a lot of variation in living expenses and affording things like education or healthcare), but it doesn't necessarily for many of the other countries out there. For example, i recently did a blog post on my earnings as a software dev in Latvia: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings

In short:

  - i earn 1.5x the average salary/wage in my country
  - that figure is approximately 1500 euros per month

To afford the cheapest VW Golf [0] (a popular car here), i'd need to save up 22'325 euros, which is the equivalent of 15 months' wages, or ~30 months with the ability to save 50% of what i make. It'd take me over 2 years to afford a new car, which is also why the used car market is so popular here.

To afford a house in my region of the country [1], i'd need to save up around 100'000 euros, which is the equivalent of 67 months' wages, or ~134 months with the ability to save 50% of what i make. It'd take me over 11 years to afford my own house, something for which i really don't have an answer - most people just rent apartments instead (also we're talking about countryside properties here, not the ones in cities).

Of course, it's not all bad, but how much money people in various careers make and how much PPP holds true in a globalized economy varies greatly, as expressed in that blog post of mine. Some countries are just poor and the people in them aren't well paid. Some companies are profitable but aren't incentivized to pay developers anything above what they can get away with - which is also why many of the WITCH companies have regional offices in my country, as we're one destination for outsourcing. As for how hard these careers are, it depends: some people are miserable working in software, but at the same time at least it isn't back breaking work.

Links:

[0] https://www.volkswagen.lv/lv/models/golf-8.html

[1] https://www.ss.lv/lv/real-estate/homes-summer-residences/lim...