Their families.
Blazing ignorance of the most basic verisimilitudes of the human condition is one of the more annoying characteristics of hacker culture.
Maybe the non-501 developers are genuinely self-sacrificing, in every sense of that word, while the 501s live off their labors. For the 501 is very happy to use Google to search for his Disneyland trip, to use his iPhone to find driving directions, to use Facebook to post the photos.
Say what you will, those companies were not built by 501 engineers, though 501s might well be going there now that the pioneers have built multibillion dollar companies.
The issue is something like this. One workaholic nerd works his life out to achieve something very extraordinary. Then he become famous and rich. And then people begin to dissect his life. During the process people figure out, that we worked crazy hours to achieve what he achieved.
When a theory is made out of this process your logical inference is working very hard is a prerequisite for success.
You start with this assumption then you automatically start classifying 501 workers as somebody who can't do anything big in life. Go a step further, people start classifying 501 people as lazy or inefficient.
Things get bad when you start comparing.
However, apologies I can see that I misread you. Sorry about that.
That's awfully defeatist.
Why does it matter to someone who is passionate that you don't value him on your team? The end state is simple: he will not be on your team and it will not matter what you think. So what's the value of having (and writing about) this blanket opinion?
Value of writing about it? Very few of the comments on HN are valuable. People write for their own pleasure primarily, and if communication occurs that's icing on the cake. What's the "value" of you writing your rebuttal questioning the gp post's value?
TL;DR: don't really understand your question.
A multi-million dollar project that can be killed because someone doesn't want to write java interop code is something I want to support, most people mistake me for a programmer, I'm a business guy who knows how to code, what the bossman has in this situation is a win-win situation, his programmer gets to keep writing python, I get to write java interop code for a percentage of the project, and he gets a project finished.
I agree with this, but I don't think we should take the opposite for granted either-- personally I dream of a world where no human being has to scrape shit off the sidewalk to survive.
The jobs you mentioned (mines, truck driving, fast food, janitorial) involve moving things around in the physical world. When the work is done, it's clearly and perceptibly done. In certain key ways this is less mentally stressful than information work. And nowadays even a janitor can afford an apartment, computer, smartphone, and internet connection.
For those positions you mention that pay less (janitorial, fast food), the demands and training requirements are less. For those that pay more (mines, power plants), the risks are higher but the training requirements are also less.
And in each of these areas, you do have some fraction of people who are ambitious, who care about the technologies involved, and who get promoted. It's not like software engineering is the only interesting thing out there.
There's also a difference between passion and enjoyment. I can understand your work being enjoyable but not your passion. During one trip to LA I got a burger at In-N-Out. The high school aged people working there were clearly enjoying what they were doing, they made it fun while providing fast, kick ass customer service. I know developers who enjoy what they do but their real passion is something entirely different.
To me making a career out of something you don't enjoy or aren't passionate about is crazy.
Work was synonymous with slavery even until recently. People who build beautiful things like Taj Mahal, Pyramids etc were all slaves who worked at the commands of kings. And most of them did it because they had no other option or nothing else to do.
A few who realized what they are worth and escaped that became philosophers and scholars.
Getting the point? 501 vs non-501, Its almost like slaves Vs philosophers.
Organized 9-5 labor is always going to be inglorious even if you are the best algorithmist in the whole world, because deep down inside it has a strong taste of slavery to it. They are parallels to the slaves who build the Colosseum of Rome. Even if you were the slave who could build 10 walls in a day you are still 'A nobody'. No one will even remember you.
And individual contributors working on their own crazy hours are always going to be glorious people, because deep down inside they are parallels to Socrates and Plato.
No, no, and no. It is embedded in recent cultures of vast inequality, slaves fed on dreams of glory. Egalitarian cultures don't have very much concept of "shit jobs", not the way we do.
If you found your passion and it also pays your bills, great. Congrats. This is not true for most people.
>People who work on something they aren't passionate about deserve neither, and their sacrifice will go unnoticed.
To which I reply:
That's an extremely arrogant, insulting and self-entitled notion.
You, sir, ONLY get to do what you "love" because millions of people every after day do what they don't love but have to do anyway (in order to pay for their food and family). People from the guys that work in mines to gather materials to make your computer internals, to guys that transport gas and flip switches at energy plants so that you can have electricity, to the guy that flips your burgers when you go to the fast food joint across the street, to the guy that cleans your offices. Not "loving your job" has nothing to do with an aversion to "hard work" (people work far more hours and intensely in shit jobs, because they have to), or not taking pride in one's work (there are people that DO take pride in doing a good job at cleaning streets from garbage for example --that doesn't mean the love their job).
It's a silly American notion that every job can be (or worse, has to be) the worker's "passion" --and only few get to have the privilege of that notion, and then again only after they have a lot of lucky breaks.