Further, try to abide by their requests. If they want the trash can by the door to your office or cubicle on Thursday evening, move the damn trashcan to the door. They have 100 to empty; it's a trivial task for you.
We can get wound up in ourselves and forget to hold a door, or avoid spilling crumbs on our carpet, or log out of our workstation, or use a different hallway when the floor is being waxed, or to move the trash can. It's not really a reflection on our self-importance. It's just a character flaw.
> Further, try to abide by their requests. If they want the trash can by the door to your office or cubicle on Thursday evening, move the damn trashcan to the door.
Better yet, take your damn trashcan out to the damn dumpster your own damn self.
Then we can save some damn money and fire the damn janitor.
> They have 100 to empty; it's a trivial task for you.
It's a trivial part of their job. They're getting paid for it.
It’s trivial to correct code formatting. You’re getting paid to code, presumably. What’s the better world: one in which your colleagues make a trivial effort to install a linter and make their code nicely formatted before handing it off, or one in which they don’t bother, say it’s trivial and part of your job for you to correct it, and then threaten to fire you?
In Japanese schools, the kids are the ones doing the cleaning. Not just taking out the trash, but cleaning the blackboards, mopping the floor, tidying up the desks, cleaning the bathrooms, etc.
The reasoning isn't to save money, however. It is precisely to teach them there's no such thing as work that is beneath them.
my granddad who was educated by Japanese says the crappiest stuff that made you clean like you meant it; don't read on if you don't want to be obsessed with cleaning stuff.
on how to leaving any space...
Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.
on how to clean...
treat the object you want to clean like it's your soul
> Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.
I love the Japanese ethos of Community (but don't always find myself in agreement with some of the other aphorisms, like "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.").
However, the person responsible for that gem has obviously never looked into a hawk's nest.
It's not all that different than going home and doing the cooking or the laundry. Surely you don't leave housework to your partner "because your time would be better spent elsewhere", right?
We don't think of brushing our teeth as "wading into the weeds", it's just an integral part of life for us. Cooking and laundry is (hopefully) just as much an integral part of life. Similarly, the Japanese famously don't have public trash bins everywhere and yet their streets are spotless because they consider public space cleanliness an integral part of life.
And one would hope that saying hi to people is an integral part of life too.
If I had the money I would pay for a cleaner in my house, for sure. I value cleanliness and relationships enough that of course I will do chores myself absent a cleaner, but I have no illusion that I am not trading my time and that my time would not be better spent doing other things.
> I have no illusion that I am not trading my time
I think that's kinda the point of the article. The people that ignore janitors surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent elsewhere than talking to cleaning staff. Rich parents in Dubai surely are under no illusion that it is better to hire full time nannies than to waste their time raising their own kids. The people in Wall-E surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent entertaining themselves than, well, anything.
But as the increasingly absurd examples hopefully illustrate, not everyone thinks the same way. For example, my wife firmly believes that food that is paid for is intrinsically inferior, because, all else being equal, it's not made with the same level of care as if it was made by family (and this in fact can be a particularly noticeable observation if you come from a culture that takes pride in elaborate cuisine)
We all have things that we believe implicitly are a waste of our time, perhaps because of our upbringing or some other reason, but I think the overarching message of the article is that there are some things in life that we should not be compromising on, even if we did have all the money in the world.
I went to an American private high school that also did this, although not everyone was thorough, so they had custodians clean every so often. In retrospect, it was kind of cool.
I don't mind taking out the trash but I think we'll need to have a janitor on staff because at least a few (figurative) bad apples will neglect to take theirs out, and they'll throw away (literal) apples, which will go bad, and then we'll get flies.
Straw man? The example was moving the can near the door so the janitor could efficiently collect them, without for instance entering your office and perhaps upsetting cables, equipment etc.
Let's quit jumping to strawmen about doing the janitors job, shall we? It's just about being respectful of the guy in the job next to you.
The comment I was responding to suggested that people take out their own garbage and fire the janitor, that was the thought I was responding to. Perhaps that is the comment you meant to respond to?
I'm not sure if it is a strawman. They seem to be suggesting that going too farther in the direction of helping the janitor would remove the need for the janitor. To the extent that it is a strawman, I think they've even failed to beat up on their strawman, for the reason that I point out -- the janitor would still be necessary.
Trivialities in logistics and their impact on you as a person are two different things. If I added 500ms of latency to a keyboard (ssh, a bunch of VPNs, etc) I imagine a janitor would say ‘it’s a trivial part of your job, you’re getting paid for it.’ Yet that would cause many developers to pull their hair out.
I do get being nice to janitors--and I am happy to help them with something if asked, and I don't "ignore" them as noted in this article as I definitely agree that's rude to treat them as second-class humans unworthy of being regarded with eye contact or banter--but I am being paid to do my job and they are being paid to their job and if I am spending my time or mental energy doing part of their job then I feel like something in the division of labor has failed. No one wants me spending my time working on the website or managing the social media account, and while every department certainly has something I could add to my task list to make their job easier--such as going out of my way to maintain a high-level changelog of the product or maintain a list of new translation syringe--it is their job to let me do my job, and we hired the people to do the extra work of going back through the work I did and finding those things I didn't write down at the time so I could maximize the time I spend on new development or architecture or debugging or cutting server costs or whatever it is that I was hired to do. I also think there is something to the people who argue that if you go out of your way to put away carts or use self-checkout "to help the people who work there" without realizing that you are REPLACING the people who work there--as, due to your efforts, the company can hire fewer people to do whatever that job is--then you are not actually their friend. While I avoid getting crumbs on the carpet because it is likely to attract ants or cause other forms of permanent damage to the room in the form of ground-in debris or stains, it just isn't clear to me that the most "janitor friendly" action--in the long run--wouldn't be to actively create as large of a mess as I can without people deciding I am myself such a liability that I lose my own job (and one could imagine actually conspiring with the janitorial staff over creating such elaborate "but understandable" messes ;P). Certainly, if we merely move all the trash cans to where they are most quickly gathered, the company would be almost negligent to not assign the janitor some new task to fill the time that was saved (or reduce their hours, or scale down the department, etc.).
Or you could actually try to help the janitor by NOT doing that so they still can get paid to do it. These are people who are often looking for hours and picking up multiple jobs and you seriously think you are helping them by doing literally any of their job for them? (FWIW, I also haven't ever experienced a janitor asking me to do this kind of stuff for them and I am actually the only person at the various buildings I work at who has bothered to talk to the janitors, because I actually try to treat them like humans who have needs.)
> Or you could actually try to help the janitor by NOT doing that so they still can get paid to do it.
Sounds to me like a very inefficient way of accomplishing tasks. Marginal cost of everyone doing their own simple task is less than the cost of employing a janitor. Furthering the logic, we should litter the place for more janitors to get employed.
I agree! But the person at the top of this thread wanted to help the janitor, and that's not what they are doing: they are, at best, helping the people who pay for the janitor, whether you want to model that as the company or the customers of the company. And that's a reasonable (or even "noble") thing to optimize for (though if you work at the company and are being paid to do something else with your time or mental effort you aren't helping the company either as you are just reassigning peoples' roles that were carefully chosen), but it simply isn't the same thing as helping the janitor, which is what everyone seems to think they are doing. You 100% shouldn't be an asshole to the janitor: they are people like you and you shouldn't avert your eyes or ignore their presence as if they are a pariah... but I think if you talk to them for a while you will realize more of them than you seem to think understand how this works as they are often a unionized position and their organizers are making sure everyone knows to keep work up and not tolerate their job being redistributed to others.
The point I was making is that someone else's job isn't being nice to them, because you aren't doing something nice FOR THEM you are instead doing something nice FOR THEIR EMPLOYER as the amount of money they are paid or the load of tasks they are being given will adjust behind the scenes. It isn't intuitive, but once pointed out I hope it becomes obvious? If you do enough of their job for them, they get fired :(. If you cause then enough work, maybe you can get them a raise. (And yes: capitalism sucks like this if this makes you feel bad somehow, but you are moving in the wrong direction if you are trying to work on it: you should strive to have solidarity with workers!)
>you should strive to have solidarity with workers
Kind of weird to make this point at the end, right after you apparently say you intentionally make the cleaning jobs harder. As a cleaner if people make more of a mess of things, you'll just get overwhelmed with too much work and then things will look messy and you'll get fired. Cleaners usually don't get raises, and especially not raises for doing more work. You maybe get token raises when you threaten to leave due to low pay and the managers can't find a replacement straight away.
Nobody ever saw a clean office and came to the conclusion, "Our cleaning staff must be lazing about because someone else is cleaning for them, we should fire them all!"
Again, where did this meme about 'doing someone elses job'? The point made was, be respectful of them when they're doing their job, by cooperating and not winging about it.
This has become a tortuous argument which on the surface seems to be for justifying being disrespectful or lazy.
I don't know about other people but I go through my life trying to make things easier for other people, or failing that at least not make things harder, in the hope that someone else will do the same for me.
The people at a company are all hired to fill specific positions and accomplish specific tasks. The entire goal of working for a living isn't kind to begin with. Here: let's say you literally donated your time every night to do the janitor's job entirely, so they didn't have to do anything, as you love cleaning anyway and it makes you feel really happy to see them not having to do all of this work... now the janitor is going to be fired, because the janitor isn't adding value to the company anymore. It is frustrating to be sure, but if you want to actually show solidarity with workers in a capitalist system it involves realizing that the incentives are already screwed up.
I actually do, but the reasoning isn't because I am deluding myself into thinking I am being kind to the employees (it is because I am trying to be kind to the customers, by making the food cheaper). I realize you want to be nice to other people, but you should realize you are doing it wrong (or at least doing it to a different set of people than you intended)... as noted, I treat the janitors with respect and don't ignore them and even do things they ask me to do as I tend to know who they are in a way most people don't (partly as I tend to be the only person still hanging around in the middle of the night, but also because I don't have any issue talking to them as I don't do the bad thing the article is complaining about). I have even hired janitors for my spaces and I make sure to pay them well and treat them with respect. You aren't being kind to people when you pick up their job function... you just aren't.
Following the logic here and above, do you make sure to create very large and annoying to clean messes in office spaces / spaces were janitors will clean so that, by the nature of the work, pushes their employer to increase the pay for the job?
No, because 1) in cases where it is a building I am working in/for such a thing is likely to have direct and potentially significant negative blowback on me for increasing the company's costs; 2) in other places many people (I am guessing including yourself) are sufficiently privileged to not see the "us vs. the overlords" dynamic and so look at people who increase these sorts of costs with contempt; and 3) as noted elsewhere in this thread, helping the janitors isn't the only goal: keeping costs low for society IS valuable and so it can be perfectly rational to avoid creating messes you know someone else will have to clean in order to lower the costs on society to clean them... but only if you realize you are not doing this to be nice to the janitors.
Like, the issue I am having with this thread is that a ton of people who seem to have some concept of what the ethical thing to do here is--and I don't even necessarily disagree with the concluding actions!--but I don't think they actually have the perspective to realize that the reasons why those actions might or might not be ethical are completely different from what one might intuitively expect due to the incentive structure of working for a company under capitalism. And so then you are all taking this idea of that ethical conclusion and trying to make me feel shitty for how I treat the janitors somehow when the janitors are categorically not the people you are helping with your ethical outcomes :/. Yes: the result of this thought process applied en masse would be horribly inefficient and seemingly costly for a ton of people, but the janitors would call you a hero as they are paid by the hour.
My context: while I myself am yet another privileged software developer, I am also a strongly-left-leaning elected government official who often has deep heart to hearts with friends who are union organizers... people who fight daily on behalf of people in these situations, and it is when I channel them--not some heartless asshole who refuses to even look at janitors--that I feel most strongly about these issues. The idea that you are doing someone a favor by going out of your way to not help them in their personal life but to do part of their job is just such a strange thought process to me... I have houseless people in the area CONSTANTLY asking for work, and if there were tasks that needed to get done maybe we could hire them to the beautification program we're in charge of (which explicitly works with houseless employees); so sure: if you care about them, you might literally litter our streets with trash ;P.
The reason to maybe not cause messes (and I don't, because while I am not an asshole to the janitors I am not optimizing for them over everyone else) is not to be kind to these people in the way the person I replied to seems to think: it is because it is an inefficiency--a cost to the system as a whole--and that cost to the system will be born by someone else, whether it be tracked directly back to you or indirectly cause increased costs for food or other staples. The fewer people who work at supermarkets or restaurants, the cheaper food will be--your taxes are paying for our beautification program, so your taxes might be lower if there is less work to be done--but this comes at a disproportionate cost to the people who relied on those jobs, so don't think you are doing them the favor... if you were truly wanting to do them a favor, you would, in fact, do this awkward thing of trying to cause messes.
What I don't do, though: go out of my way to clean up messes caused by other people when I know someone else has a job to clean them. Example: I now no longer clean streets myself if I walk past a pile of trash... I pull out an app on my phone and take a photo of the trash so the aforementioned local beautification program sends a person out who is excited to be paid money and the program can show that i...
I never did any of this stuff but got along with them all. Theyplayed with my Oculus Quest, we'd shoot the shit sometimes, shared some of their bomb ass guacamole.
Everyone's got their mode of interacting with people. I'm really not into this shaming people for not matching your interaction mode thing.
This sanctimonious ostentatious virtuosity is really too much.
To make it worse this is truly junk content. God help me.
It's hard for me to imagine a place where a janitor would dare make such a request. Usually service star are dreadfully afraid of getting abused by the (relatively) powerful problem all around them who can easily ruin their jobs and therefore lives by spite or just accident .
My grandfather was a public school janitor after he moved from the farm to the big city for a better opportunity to feed and raise his kids. There were more than a dozen of them so steady work was important.
He cleaned the school and in the process set his kids up to be responsible adults. My grandmother used her sewing skills to become seamstress for the wealthiest families in the city too. Neither of my grandparents ever got rich in their new work but they did survive and set their kids up for success.
He had a mischievous twinkle in his eye and he loved telling stories. With a steady supply of grandkids from all his children he never lacked for an audience.
My first "real" job out of high school was working in a factory as a machine operator. There are two things that I remember hearing at some point that have always stuck with me:
1. It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice.
2. Never forget where you came from, because you might end up back there someday.
I've cleaned change rooms at an outdoor swimming pool. Things I'm glad I can say I've done, and probably helped on the way to dealing with the parenting of babies, but would be happy to never have to face again.
My father was an elementary school janitor, so I have a different perspective than some. Something I've repeated often: "My dad worked for a living. I just play with computers."
Of course, in most offices in my part of the country, and I suspect in many other areas, is that the janitors are often Hispanic, with language being a common barrier. I wouldn't want to speculation about their immigration status, but knowing the economics here, I wouldn't be surprised either way. Unfortunately, it works out to be a de facto caste system, with the respect dynamic that accompanies.
When I was single and dating, I found a high correlation between how a dating partner treated service workers (including waiters) and how nice/desirable a partner they were. Garbage people tend to treat service workers as their personal servants, to bully and abuse.
> Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. (...) -- Ingersoll
I also had it wrong, and thought it came from Lincoln originally.
Per Reuters Fact Check team:
> Misattributed. There is no evidence Lincoln ever made such a statement about testing a man’s character. The author appears to be Robert G. Ingersoll, who used this phrase to describe the 16th president of the United States on several occasions in the 1890s [1].
There's a difference between knowing and understanding and the older I get the more I understand just how true this is.
I would also add the cliche that with power comes responsibilities and most people don't respect that responsibility. Mistakes happen and obliviousness is a thing (communication is never perfect), but I've been shocked by how cavalierly some people will wield power that has real effects on other human beings many times in the past.
There are few cats I've met that tolerate being ignored, they just escalate their activities until there's a choice between 'give attention to cat' and 'buy new carpet / furniture / bedding / clothes'.
(coming from me though, who can't ignore the big, scruffy -to put it mildly - neighbourhood stray tom cat that comes to visit a few days per year for the last six or seven years)
I ignore the janitor because of the obvious wealth disparity between us. He works just as hard as me but is doing a job nobody likes and is paid less for it.
It's completely unfair. And when I just see the janitor it's all I think about.
This article is like, be nice to the people you step on. Yeah. I don't disagree with that sentiment.
That seems like a rationalization to me, and one that doesn’t actually make anyone’s life better. Inequality is a fact of life. You both work hard, but you could do his job and he couldn’t do yours. He almost certainly knows that and has come to terms with it. You don’t interact with him because acknowledging the disparity causes you discomfort embarrassment. But doing that doesn’t make his life any better.
And, of course, people aren’t just their jobs. Maybe you like the same sports team. Maybe he likes to talk about his kids. Who knows?
No that’s ridiculous. I don’t want to do that job and I wouldn’t choose it but I absolutely can do it. I cleaned my own house just fine for 20 years before I hired someone else to do it for me.
> This article is like, be nice to the people you step on.
The first step is to not step on those people. Simple things matter, like following simple requests (e.g. the placing the trash can next to the door mentioned in another thread). Attitude matters too. There is a reason why some places call janitors caretakers: they are there to maintain the physical spaces people work in, not to clean up people's messes.
I'm saying every engineer is stepping on him by virtue of being paid 10x more. We all step on him but NONE of us acknowledge it. We're all posers, pretending that being nice to him makes any difference.
Janitors realize that the people they work around have no control over what they earn in the vast majority of cases. What people do have control over is their behaviour towards janitors, whether their direct interactions are respectful and whether they make the job of those tasked to cleaning up easier or more difficult.
Being nice also makes a difference in the sense that being nice makes a difference when you are working with your colleagues. Having healthy attitudes towards each other reduces stress and remove roadblocks to getting work done.
You can control it. Give him part of your salary, instead of throwing him useless smiles and acknowledgment.
Saying you can't control it is a lie you tell yourself to feel better. You obviously can control part of it. We all can. But why don't I give him my salary? Because I care more about my salary then his suffering. Same with you.
I'm not insulting the janitor. I'm insulting myself. And you. And everyone else who works at the company who steps on him. I'm saying, that a "hi" and a smile is utter bullshit. We all know we're stepping on him and a "hi" and a "smile" is opium to make us feel better about ourselves.
I think ignoring someone because you're embarrassed by them is only marginally better than ignoring someone because you think you're better than them. A smile and a nod are free.
Marginally. And obvious. We don't need an article to tell us the basics about how to be decent people. The article wasn't written to tell engineers obvious things that we all already know and likely do.
It was written to make us feel better about ourselves. "Be nice to poor people" is a better title for this article.
If you think you’re stepping on the janitor, maybe you should stop.
It’s a job, not a caste. When you apply to work somewhere as a janitor you expect to work as a janitor. Don’t pity people doing a job that pays less, you have no idea what their story is or why they’re doing what they’re doing.
And if you think you aren’t adding to collective wealth and making salaries go further and further than they have before by growing the pie, maybe you should switch jobs and find one that keeps that pie growing.
>I'm saying everyone including you participates in this fake BS. As if being nice to the janitor solves the fundamental problem. It just covers it up.
Are you're saying that unless other folks make as much money as you do, they should not be treated with simple human respect, because doing so points up the inequality in our society?
Wow.
Being kind to the folks around you has nothing to do with wealth/income inequality or other issues in our society.
Rather, it's about our shared humanity.
What's more, being kind (or at least polite) is the least you could do. If you're not willing to do so unless that other person has something you want, what does that say about you?
I'm not telling you what to do, think or say, but I hope i never meet you.
>Are you're saying that unless other folks make as much money as you do, they should not be treated with simple human respect, because doing so points up the inequality in our society?
Are you putting words in my mouth?
Wow.
Being kind to folks is basic knowledge. Everyone knows it. The article is obvious. It's not telling anyone anything new. Why was such an obvious article written? For what purpose. Certainly not to teach engineers to be nice to poor people. That's obvious... no need to teach them.
It was written to make you feel better about yourself and your relative position to the people you step on everyday when they clean your toilet because you can't clean it yourself.
>I'm not telling you what to do, think or say, but I hope i never meet you.
How ironic. Being kind is basic knowledge. Yet you say something like this while purporting to be kind... even though it's quite obvious we are unlikely to ever meet. Why waste energy to say something we both know? Why did you say something so obvious?
You said it to be mean. While pretending not to be mean. Why? Because it makes you feel better.
>>Are you're saying that unless other folks make as much money as you do, they should not be treated with simple human respect, because doing so points up the inequality in our society?
>Are you putting words in my mouth?
No. Note the question mark at the end of the sentence. That means (as apparently you are unaware) it's a question, not a statement.
That was the impression I got from your comment. Apparently, I misunderstood your point (and if so, I'm not sure what your point was. Perhaps you could elucidate?). My apologies.
>Being kind to folks is basic knowledge. Everyone knows it. The article is obvious. It's not telling anyone anything new. Why was such an obvious article written? For what purpose. Certainly not to teach engineers to be nice to poor people. That's obvious... no need to teach them.
It should be basic, but it isn't. And more's the pity.
I didn't read (nor do I intend to) the article.
I have no idea why an article I didn't write (or read, for that matter) was written. Perhaps that's something you might ask the author.
>It was written to make you feel better about yourself and your relative position to the people you step on everyday when they clean your toilet because you can't clean it yourself.
If you say so. But as I didn't read the article, it doesn't make me feel anything.
I'd add that I'm kind and polite to people not because they have something I want, but because I respect other humans and myself.
>>I'm not telling you what to do, think or say, but I hope i never meet you.
>How ironic. Being kind is basic knowledge. Yet you say something like this while purporting to be kind... even though it's quite obvious we are unlikely to ever meet. Why waste energy to say something we both know? Why did you say something so obvious?
Because your comment appeared to not only demean those who clean up after you, but also to beat up on others because you think that being kind to such folks isn't sincere.
It's been my experience (I'm more than half a century old) that when folks ascribe motivations to other people, that reflects the motivations of the speaker rather than the recipient.
As such, I can only assume that you feel that way. I don't want to interact with folks like that. Hence my statement.
I didn't say that to be mean, as I have no interest or stake in your personal emotional state.
Rather, I said it because I don't want to be around folks who present themselves as the only arbiters of other peoples' motivations and feelings.
>You said it to be mean. While pretending not to be mean. Why? Because it makes you feel better.
Your assertion doesn't make it true. I don't need to make others feel bad (or have others make me feel good) to feel good about myself.
I try to live my life as a decent, kind person. I don't always succeed, but I do my best. And that's enough for me.
Do you clean someone else's mess? Are you wiping up someone else's shit? It's a demeaning job. There is clearly a difference. I think you're sort of trying to dance around it.
If you step back and look at what you wrote, you’re saying you believe wealth disparity is awkward, and that you find it less awkward to ignore a person.
The person you choose to ignore might not agree with you on either of those points, but you don’t let yourself find that out because you won’t talk to them. It might do you good to second guess yourself now and then, in order to escape these local minima.
I see what you're saying and I'm half way there with you.
The important things are:
a) don't ignore (just in the same way you won't ignore any other person, it's not a status thing, just a human thing)
b) don't patronize - the comments in this thread and the general "be nice to poor people" has a feel good condescension written all over it, which you're rightly calling out. But it is possible (and baseline important) to be respectful to anyone and not be condescending.
you have a point. I guess I'm more referring to the tendency and desire to ignore them. I'm embarrassed about my position, but I and most people won't ignore them as that's against common human decency.
Feel good condescension is exactly my point. It's the perfect phrase to illustrate what I'm trying to say. Thanks.
You may find this post by someone who spent most of his life poor then became reasonably well-off enlightening, specifically his comments about how he was historically confused by the rich people in his life avoiding the topic of money:
About your flagged child comment: you are stating as fact you know how others think - you are wrong and even worse, you are rude. Are you assuming that others think like you do? Take care: I think your attitude is likely to result in strongly negative effects in your life.
I feel like trading spaces every month or so with a different employee for a brief period of time would be a really, really positive exercise. If you could arrange it so you can mitigate business disruptions while people fumble around (maybe do whatever is typically done with new hires), I have a feeling the mutual appreciation for what other people contribute would lead to better cooperation.
I know there are lots of TV shows and movies about this, so it’s not a novel idea or anything, and I understand the potential for it to backfire, but I can’t overstate the cooperative benefits of gratitude if you really understand and appreciate what it is everyone is contributing.
Yeah, there are almost too many reality shows like that, really.
I wouldn't make it a "trading places" thing. I'd like to see a full semester of retail work and a full semester of food service work be a requirement to get a bachelor's degree. I've done both, and for far longer than a semester each. One thing it taught me was to never get angry at someone who's trying to help me.
My mom was a night guard, then a janitor for many years. I tagged along to some places she worked. I got to play and hang out after hours in the interesting buildings. But yeah, we were "invisible" so to speak. People were often impolite and rude to us because they saw us as beneath them. I always make a point smile and greet the janitors and other service workers I encounter, partly because I know what it feels like to be "invisible".
I always try to talk to everyone but I'm not sure its the right thing to do. The guy who talks the most is a manager who is worth tens of millions but talks and laughs with the Janitor, its nice but you know he'll never get invited around for dinner which makes it a bit fake to me.
some custodians like to shoot the shit. others do not. same with lobby staff.
when they do i've found that it's worth listening, they sometimes have very interesting things to say.
same used to go for nyc cab drivers, although it's a bit different in the uber era. i have a book sitting on my shelf that was written (and self promoted) by a cab driver.
Very true. Everyone at the very least deserves a basic greeting and acknowledgement, but it's unrealistic to expect anyone on the job to socialize at length.
Especially if that person was just berated or humiliated by someone "important" on a power trip, extremely stressed by the job, or is preoccupied with personal issues that you have no idea about.
I've been in that position before.
I think privilieged people that don't have the same kind of stressors in their life that working class people frequently have, can then scoff when that person doesn't have the time or energy for a conversation, as if they expect those beneath them to entertain them with conversation in addition to their job duties.
It's surprising how much taking 5 seconds to say "Hi, how's it going" can improve any interaction.
Feels like this quote fits perfectly into this context:
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
(Attributed to Maya Angelou)
It's one of those things so obvious once you know. Not like I was anywhere near a total jerk beforehand, but it changed how I approached lots of different interactions.
I cannot stand it when people ignore (or even worse, are hostile to) custodial staff.
If anyone ever thinks taking out the trash is an unimportant job, try living without rubbish collection for a week. Suddenly it will become very important!
Show some appreciation for these people doing a very laborious and repetitive job for minimal pay, often outside regular business hours, and so probably cuts into their family time.
There is a famous photograph from the White House of Obama stopping to fist bump a janitor with a mop. It would be a great illustration for this blog post.
Justice Thomas is also well-known for knowing everyone's names.
> He knows the janitors, cafeteria workers, everyone. He knows their names, the names of their family members, where they're in school, and he is viewed by the law clerks of all the justices as the most accessible of the court's members.
In addition to janitors & wait staff: you can chat with the homeless people, too. You don't have to ask them about "their situation" or offer to help them. Weather, sports, the traffic... just treat them like a person who's not invisible.
Before anyone jumps up & objects: yes, there are a lot of homeless who don't want to talk to you, or who are downright dangerous. You can avoid those.
How do you pick out someone as being homeless? I'm in the UK and (accepting in the US it may be different?) there is a common misconception that people who sit in shop doorways begging for money are 'homeless' people when, in fact, they are usually just people who have a drug habit they need to continually finance.
The real homeless people are doing their best to blend into the background and not to look homeless.
Is...being decent to everyone regardless of job status in life a new thing? Has tech come so far that we have to re-teach ourselves the basics and then brag about how we smile at "service staff"?
Up next in a techbro blog post: "I have discovered that money doesn't buy happiness, and that being an asshole isn't a good thing."
It’s not exactly limited to tech but is more general to knowledge workers. Especially ones who employ support staff even at their homes. Over time they get so far removed from doing household chores that they begin to treat it as beneath them and hence the staff as unworthy of their respect.
I’m saying this being from a nation where employing household cooks, maids etc is norm once a certain income threshold is crossed, and where owing to really high inequities human labor is extremely low cost.
as a tech guy who comes from a family of blue collar and service industry workers I always have to laugh a little bit about pieces like this. It always reads like someone just went on a safari and found an exotic animal or found themselves in Good Will Hunting. Like, more than half of the population doesn't have a college degree. Store clerk, janitor, delivery driver etc are the most common jobs around, I always wonder how people manage to dodge all of them.
That said I don't think the piece is that bad because the author at least genuinely seems to try and to be kind, there are quite a few people in the industry who are genuinely callous.
I think there is just a high correlation between people for whom this "tip" isn't painfully obvious and people who think their thoughts are so valuable that they belong in a substack.
You have to be nice to the little people that read substacks; they after-all are people too, not as smart, sucessful, attractive and knowledgeable as ones self, but still deserving of a lesson or two in life to help them.
It’s hard to talk to people who make 10x less than you and live in a HCOL city without making somebody feel like shit. Janitors have terrible lives and I’m sure both of us would rather not discuss it.
"Janitors have terrible lives and I’m sure both of us would rather not discuss it."
There are so many articles shared here on developer depression, burn out and so on. Maybe you should try speaking with some actual janitors, some of them do quite ok. Maybe some are actually happy, because now they have a job to support their family and are not on the run anymore.
Or they did not bind their happines to their bank account and find meaning elsewhere. Or maybe they rather do cleaning, than feeling proud to know how to game SEO and flood the world with shitty adds or alike.
They can’t afford families because they can barely afford to rent a room in a basement an hour from the office. Sometimes they share a bedroom so they can send some money back to a developing country I guess?
If they were born early enough to be home owners then they probably increase their net worth by more than me every year and it makes me feel like shit for losing the real estate lottery
I often work till the very late evening, which gives me a chance to meet most of the custodial staff. Some of them have very good, eye-opening stories, showing me how lucky I am in life (and I am making waaaay below what I perceive HN folks to earn). It is also a good opportunity to practice foreign languages and to try some foods I haven't eaten before. (I sometimes bring some homemade food for folks who take care of the office and they sometimes reciprocate, even though I do my best to make it clear that they don't have to.)
I would highly recommend trying to get to know the "janitors!"
This seems harder in our modern world where everything is contracted out to the lowest bidder. I've had great conversations with custodial staff at schools, parks, and other areas that actually hire the workers. At my day job, a giant corporation which hires its engineers but outsources its janitors, chefs, and so on, there's a totally different vibe.
Even the few janitors that speak English are both rushed to complete their tasks in the insufficient allotted time and almost terrified to talk to the normal employees, presumably due to the perceived power balance - were an employee to complain about them, the vendor would almost certainly fire them rather than risk offending the client. It's not fair, but it is reality, and it means that even when I do say hello or hold a door or whatever I don't get a response.
The way I read it they're arguing both that it's condescending to think that they need to be told to say hi to custodial staff, and that the custodial staff might find it condescending for someone to hold a door.
One of the interesting things I've found while travelling is the different forms of interaction with customer service, hospitality, custodial staff. US tends to have a 'customer is always right' sickly sweet interactions. China has custodial staff that almost live at the office (the feel of Mum doing the dishes and washing, and that you're almost in their house). France/Paris you always say hello (bon jour) when you enter the store or it's rude. I've never had such "rude" blunt interactions as I did in Sofia, and thought it was me/tourist/english, but no, I witnessed equally gruff dismissive interactions for locals.
I'm arguing treating "custodial staff" as some distinct group that deserves special treatment, in deep need of your smiles and door holding is condescending. The tone of the original article and this reply came across like the authors think they're somehow above the "custodial staff". Like they are lords talking about the peasantry.
I chat with/hold doors for everyone I encounter. I said custodial staff here because that was the thesis of the original article. No one's "in need of it" in any sense other than most people benefit from social interaction and being acknowledged.
I'm betting that if I, and most of my colleagues, ever complained about custodial staff, it would be totally ignored. My charitable interpretation of that phrase is that "real" janitors probably don't realize that many of us are "just" janitors of computing, even if we get free vitamin water.
One of the janitors in my high school once gave us a lecture on linear algebra. I don't know what he did before he left the former Warsaw Pact country he was from, but it was one of those whoa kind of experiences.
In the 1990s, when the former USSR had gone to shit, you could meet a lot of menial workers from the ex-Soviet republics who had academic degrees and could hold a conversation to prove it.
I studied mathematics in Prague in 1996-2003. More than once I met a janitor or a taxi driver who, albeit with a heavy Russian or Ukrainian accent, knew what a uniformly continuous function was and what does the Chinese Remainder Theorem say.
The scale has changed, but those days have never really ended. I'm from a Caribbean country that people are usually quite eager to leave. I've seen numerous cases of people with post-secondary education and jobs to go with it leave for the US or UK and end up doing "unskilled" labor because their qualifications don't carry across.
New (US) grads have significantly less qualifications than anyone wants to admit. It's getting 2 years of experience that makes the difference.
When looking to hire people from South America, there was lots of manufacturing experience, but we needed Design experience.
When we hired CAD guys, they followed directions fine, but possibly too literally or would stop too prematurely. When getting local, non engineers to do CAD, they would read our mind more.
Not that this is a show stopper. If we met 3 times a day for a quick meeting with our SA CAD guys, we achieved just as much. It just required more meetings/phone calls.
Yep, can confirm that: The time i was working in an hospital in germany (around 2001) an older dude worked in the janitor department, turned out, he had an doctor degree in mechanical engeneering and was designing jet engines for MiG before the soviet union collapsed... and now was repairing toilets and changing lightbulbs.
We can all joke about how Big Tech shovels some of the finest technical minds towards clicking ads.
But on the plus side, the size of the tech sector in 2022 does make for much more efficient job market for technical skills, than in decades past.
I would hope someone with a doctorate in mechanical engineering, who used to design jet engines, would be able adapt their skills to go work somewhere like Tesla, or a self-driving car company, or any other similar startup.
I'll tell you the realities of Mechanical Engineering and auto.
You typically will make a single part. Maybe its the plastic to cover the car's metal. Maybe its the screen user interfaces with, maybe its airbags. Whatever the case, the plastic and screens are deemed necessary by society to sell a car. Some mechanical engineer will have this job.
At least you make cars right? Well there are over 20 major car companies, if your company disappeared tomorrow, life would move on with minimal interruptions.
The most you can claim is that you are forcing the automotive industry to be ultra competitive.
Strangely enough, startups/Tesla is the last place someone with advanced mechanical engineering knowledge would go. From a quality/feature standpoint, new companies have lower standards. Where an established company would be pushing technology and doing things that no one has done before, new companies are just trying to build a car. It would be a resume hit, because you worked on outdated/low tech.
The most you could hope for is additional responsibility and less red tape. I know a manager who was elevated to a director for taking a job at a start-up.
>Strangely enough, startups/Tesla is the last place someone with advanced mechanical engineering knowledge would go. From a quality/feature standpoint, new companies have lower standards. Where an established company would be pushing technology and doing things that no one has done before, new companies are just trying to build a car. It would be a resume hit, because you worked on outdated/low tech.
Seems like the opposite has happened. Tesla, in its desperate attempt to stay alive(3-4 bankruptcy scares thus far) have found a niche where other OEMs didn't have expertise in (EVs) and really gone all out in innovation in areas where other OEMs have dropped the ball. In the car industry if you are a newcomer and you are just trying to "build a car" you are wasting your time/money and you will die. There needs to be a competitive advantage that claws people away from existing OEMs. I'd argue that the reason Tesla is clawing people away from the luxury brands. as well as getting people to move upmarket from the economy brands is the quality and innovation of their product in areas where typical OEM does not prioritize. Things such as software, day to day experience etc.
In terms of internal engineering, there are innovations as well. For example: The superbottle and octopump system utilize software and clever engineering to eliminate a complete coolant loop in the system. This eliminated parts, made the system more efficient and reduced cost. Tesla didn't have the organizational baggage plus they attracted some brilliant and dedicated engineers to make it happen.
This is why, of all the schools I've gone to, LA City College remains the hardest, even after later graduating from a top ten engineering school. I was originally a biology major, and with Los Angeles flooded with refugees and immigrants, a whole lot of medical doctors and research scientists from former Soviet republics found themselves in a country where their licenses and degrees were not accepted, and they had to start over. Many of them ended up totally obliterating the curves in all of the underclass bio courses in various Los Angeles community colleges.
If really really smart immigrants stop coming to America, the country will be in deep shit, IMO. Per your question: they don't have to be from Soviet countries, just with qualifications that aren't accepted at face value.
I had a great conversation with a hydraulic fitter once, turned out after a couple of beers that he was a chartered mechanical engineer in his home country, and that we shared a passion for heat engines. You never know what someone’s hiding under their hat.
Was reminded of Bob's Burgers episodes with Mr Branca, the school custodian. Multiple times he refers to being president "before the coup" in his home country.
I talk to the janitor daily. He used to be a schoolteacher and mainly took the job for health insurance benefits. Folks often look down on this type of workers. I quite often find genuine human beings in them, they don’t have to pretend at all…
Well, I prefer that people ignore me when I work in service roles. There's no better way to observe people in their natural habitat. I once drove Uber and Lyft for a couple of years and was fascinated by what I learned by people who thought they were confessing to an uneducated driver. Why do this? Well maybe you're writing a book or working on a PhD thesis.
As someone who has worked a few service jobs: oh god please don't start a conversation with me if I'm on my lonesome. This advice needs a huge sticker that says 'mileage may vary'.
Not everyone wants the silence to be punctuated with smalltalk.
The person doing the cleaning on our office floor always wears very large and conspicuous probably noise canceling headphones, while working. Guessing she has had one too many person trying to make awkward conversation while she was just trying to get the coffee cups in the wash as quickly as possible.
The author's point of view seems to me quite condescending. Like being the janitor is considered less (and that, inevitably, everybody sees the janitor that way), so the author is trying to flip that view around (because he can, he is "not less").
Needless to say that being polite is out of the question here, and that I am sure that the author's intentions are not what I just commented, but I can't help to read it that way.
I would agree that "please" and "thank you" can take you far, however you don't just have to address them to the janitor, it's for everybody.
I think the best bet is to just acknowledge, no need to smalltalk. Just smile and say "good morning" or even just nod at them when you run by, no matter who that is, CEO or the janitor. That will be enough for a people yearning to get noticed to feel noticed, but won't unnerve the occasional person who wants to be left alone.
I agree with this comment. YMMV. I tend to just naturally start up conversations with service folks, and at least half the time they appear to be annoyed.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadWe can get wound up in ourselves and forget to hold a door, or avoid spilling crumbs on our carpet, or log out of our workstation, or use a different hallway when the floor is being waxed, or to move the trash can. It's not really a reflection on our self-importance. It's just a character flaw.
Better yet, take your damn trashcan out to the damn dumpster your own damn self.
Then we can save some damn money and fire the damn janitor.
> They have 100 to empty; it's a trivial task for you.
It's a trivial part of their job. They're getting paid for it.
The reasoning isn't to save money, however. It is precisely to teach them there's no such thing as work that is beneath them.
on how to leaving any space... Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.
on how to clean... treat the object you want to clean like it's your soul
And man oh man did I wiped those mirrors...
I love the Japanese ethos of Community (but don't always find myself in agreement with some of the other aphorisms, like "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.").
However, the person responsible for that gem has obviously never looked into a hawk's nest.
- no job is truly beneath me, and sometimes I have to wade into the weeds so better be prepared
- it's also a way to just get essentially free or cheap(er) labour by increasing the duties of those whose time would be better spent elsewhere.
We don't think of brushing our teeth as "wading into the weeds", it's just an integral part of life for us. Cooking and laundry is (hopefully) just as much an integral part of life. Similarly, the Japanese famously don't have public trash bins everywhere and yet their streets are spotless because they consider public space cleanliness an integral part of life.
And one would hope that saying hi to people is an integral part of life too.
I think that's kinda the point of the article. The people that ignore janitors surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent elsewhere than talking to cleaning staff. Rich parents in Dubai surely are under no illusion that it is better to hire full time nannies than to waste their time raising their own kids. The people in Wall-E surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent entertaining themselves than, well, anything.
But as the increasingly absurd examples hopefully illustrate, not everyone thinks the same way. For example, my wife firmly believes that food that is paid for is intrinsically inferior, because, all else being equal, it's not made with the same level of care as if it was made by family (and this in fact can be a particularly noticeable observation if you come from a culture that takes pride in elaborate cuisine)
We all have things that we believe implicitly are a waste of our time, perhaps because of our upbringing or some other reason, but I think the overarching message of the article is that there are some things in life that we should not be compromising on, even if we did have all the money in the world.
Do you think the cleaner is paid more than the other workers???
Let's quit jumping to strawmen about doing the janitors job, shall we? It's just about being respectful of the guy in the job next to you.
I'm not sure if it is a strawman. They seem to be suggesting that going too farther in the direction of helping the janitor would remove the need for the janitor. To the extent that it is a strawman, I think they've even failed to beat up on their strawman, for the reason that I point out -- the janitor would still be necessary.
Source: Am currently doing server admin/code work, have done food service and janitorial in the past.
If you made my deploys go from 30 seconds to 35, I don't think I'd care very much.
Sounds to me like a very inefficient way of accomplishing tasks. Marginal cost of everyone doing their own simple task is less than the cost of employing a janitor. Furthering the logic, we should litter the place for more janitors to get employed.
The better mindset, in my opinion, is that you can choose to do something nice for others for no reason other than to help someone else out.
Kind of weird to make this point at the end, right after you apparently say you intentionally make the cleaning jobs harder. As a cleaner if people make more of a mess of things, you'll just get overwhelmed with too much work and then things will look messy and you'll get fired. Cleaners usually don't get raises, and especially not raises for doing more work. You maybe get token raises when you threaten to leave due to low pay and the managers can't find a replacement straight away.
Nobody ever saw a clean office and came to the conclusion, "Our cleaning staff must be lazing about because someone else is cleaning for them, we should fire them all!"
This has become a tortuous argument which on the surface seems to be for justifying being disrespectful or lazy.
I guess it's just another way in which capitalism abstracts what is really a relationship between people into a relationship between bits of capital.
Like, the issue I am having with this thread is that a ton of people who seem to have some concept of what the ethical thing to do here is--and I don't even necessarily disagree with the concluding actions!--but I don't think they actually have the perspective to realize that the reasons why those actions might or might not be ethical are completely different from what one might intuitively expect due to the incentive structure of working for a company under capitalism. And so then you are all taking this idea of that ethical conclusion and trying to make me feel shitty for how I treat the janitors somehow when the janitors are categorically not the people you are helping with your ethical outcomes :/. Yes: the result of this thought process applied en masse would be horribly inefficient and seemingly costly for a ton of people, but the janitors would call you a hero as they are paid by the hour.
My context: while I myself am yet another privileged software developer, I am also a strongly-left-leaning elected government official who often has deep heart to hearts with friends who are union organizers... people who fight daily on behalf of people in these situations, and it is when I channel them--not some heartless asshole who refuses to even look at janitors--that I feel most strongly about these issues. The idea that you are doing someone a favor by going out of your way to not help them in their personal life but to do part of their job is just such a strange thought process to me... I have houseless people in the area CONSTANTLY asking for work, and if there were tasks that needed to get done maybe we could hire them to the beautification program we're in charge of (which explicitly works with houseless employees); so sure: if you care about them, you might literally litter our streets with trash ;P.
The reason to maybe not cause messes (and I don't, because while I am not an asshole to the janitors I am not optimizing for them over everyone else) is not to be kind to these people in the way the person I replied to seems to think: it is because it is an inefficiency--a cost to the system as a whole--and that cost to the system will be born by someone else, whether it be tracked directly back to you or indirectly cause increased costs for food or other staples. The fewer people who work at supermarkets or restaurants, the cheaper food will be--your taxes are paying for our beautification program, so your taxes might be lower if there is less work to be done--but this comes at a disproportionate cost to the people who relied on those jobs, so don't think you are doing them the favor... if you were truly wanting to do them a favor, you would, in fact, do this awkward thing of trying to cause messes.
What I don't do, though: go out of my way to clean up messes caused by other people when I know someone else has a job to clean them. Example: I now no longer clean streets myself if I walk past a pile of trash... I pull out an app on my phone and take a photo of the trash so the aforementioned local beautification program sends a person out who is excited to be paid money and the program can show that i...
We're talking simple respect. The strawman of 'pick up their job function' appeared out of thin air.
Everyone's got their mode of interacting with people. I'm really not into this shaming people for not matching your interaction mode thing.
This sanctimonious ostentatious virtuosity is really too much.
To make it worse this is truly junk content. God help me.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMlhIw8E0k
My grandfather was a public school janitor after he moved from the farm to the big city for a better opportunity to feed and raise his kids. There were more than a dozen of them so steady work was important.
He cleaned the school and in the process set his kids up to be responsible adults. My grandmother used her sewing skills to become seamstress for the wealthiest families in the city too. Neither of my grandparents ever got rich in their new work but they did survive and set their kids up for success.
He had a mischievous twinkle in his eye and he loved telling stories. With a steady supply of grandkids from all his children he never lacked for an audience.
Thanks for posting this.
1. It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice.
2. Never forget where you came from, because you might end up back there someday.
One of the best pieces of wisdom
Of course, in most offices in my part of the country, and I suspect in many other areas, is that the janitors are often Hispanic, with language being a common barrier. I wouldn't want to speculation about their immigration status, but knowing the economics here, I wouldn't be surprised either way. Unfortunately, it works out to be a de facto caste system, with the respect dynamic that accompanies.
As for the language barrier: a smile is pretty universal.
It doesn't take much effort to be respectful and decent, regardless of whether someone has something you want.
Per Reuters Fact Check team:
> Misattributed. There is no evidence Lincoln ever made such a statement about testing a man’s character. The author appears to be Robert G. Ingersoll, who used this phrase to describe the 16th president of the United States on several occasions in the 1890s [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-abrahamlincoln-pow...
I would also add the cliche that with power comes responsibilities and most people don't respect that responsibility. Mistakes happen and obliviousness is a thing (communication is never perfect), but I've been shocked by how cavalierly some people will wield power that has real effects on other human beings many times in the past.
There are few cats I've met that tolerate being ignored, they just escalate their activities until there's a choice between 'give attention to cat' and 'buy new carpet / furniture / bedding / clothes'.
(coming from me though, who can't ignore the big, scruffy -to put it mildly - neighbourhood stray tom cat that comes to visit a few days per year for the last six or seven years)
It's completely unfair. And when I just see the janitor it's all I think about.
This article is like, be nice to the people you step on. Yeah. I don't disagree with that sentiment.
And, of course, people aren’t just their jobs. Maybe you like the same sports team. Maybe he likes to talk about his kids. Who knows?
Not me. And I suspect most of the rest of us here couldn’t either.
Most of us would wipe a few sinks, and leave as soon as we found something more “fitting” of the class we believe ourselves to be in.
That’s quitting a job, not doing a job. Doing any kind of hard labor for a career takes something that most of us tech people simply don’t have.
And he was absolutely able to do the job of a janitor.
Being a janitor is definitely a more labor intensive job than software but it doesn't compare to something like pouring concrete or roofing.
The first step is to not step on those people. Simple things matter, like following simple requests (e.g. the placing the trash can next to the door mentioned in another thread). Attitude matters too. There is a reason why some places call janitors caretakers: they are there to maintain the physical spaces people work in, not to clean up people's messes.
I'm saying every engineer is stepping on him by virtue of being paid 10x more. We all step on him but NONE of us acknowledge it. We're all posers, pretending that being nice to him makes any difference.
Being nice also makes a difference in the sense that being nice makes a difference when you are working with your colleagues. Having healthy attitudes towards each other reduces stress and remove roadblocks to getting work done.
Saying you can't control it is a lie you tell yourself to feel better. You obviously can control part of it. We all can. But why don't I give him my salary? Because I care more about my salary then his suffering. Same with you.
A 'hi' and smile costs nothing. Please at least give that. We're not asking that you give them part of your salary.
You completely misinterpreted the post.
You're not making it better by ignoring him. You're making it worse.
You can't change capitalism. But you can change the world by adding humanity for the people you pass in your life.
Not doing that adds insult (ignoring) to injury (unfair compensation).
Believe me, I know the feeling of looking at my salary and feeling embarrassed.
It was written to make us feel better about ourselves. "Be nice to poor people" is a better title for this article.
It’s a job, not a caste. When you apply to work somewhere as a janitor you expect to work as a janitor. Don’t pity people doing a job that pays less, you have no idea what their story is or why they’re doing what they’re doing.
And if you think you aren’t adding to collective wealth and making salaries go further and further than they have before by growing the pie, maybe you should switch jobs and find one that keeps that pie growing.
Are you're saying that unless other folks make as much money as you do, they should not be treated with simple human respect, because doing so points up the inequality in our society?
Wow.
Being kind to the folks around you has nothing to do with wealth/income inequality or other issues in our society.
Rather, it's about our shared humanity.
What's more, being kind (or at least polite) is the least you could do. If you're not willing to do so unless that other person has something you want, what does that say about you?
I'm not telling you what to do, think or say, but I hope i never meet you.
Are you putting words in my mouth?
Wow.
Being kind to folks is basic knowledge. Everyone knows it. The article is obvious. It's not telling anyone anything new. Why was such an obvious article written? For what purpose. Certainly not to teach engineers to be nice to poor people. That's obvious... no need to teach them.
It was written to make you feel better about yourself and your relative position to the people you step on everyday when they clean your toilet because you can't clean it yourself.
>I'm not telling you what to do, think or say, but I hope i never meet you.
How ironic. Being kind is basic knowledge. Yet you say something like this while purporting to be kind... even though it's quite obvious we are unlikely to ever meet. Why waste energy to say something we both know? Why did you say something so obvious?
You said it to be mean. While pretending not to be mean. Why? Because it makes you feel better.
>Are you putting words in my mouth?
No. Note the question mark at the end of the sentence. That means (as apparently you are unaware) it's a question, not a statement.
That was the impression I got from your comment. Apparently, I misunderstood your point (and if so, I'm not sure what your point was. Perhaps you could elucidate?). My apologies.
>Being kind to folks is basic knowledge. Everyone knows it. The article is obvious. It's not telling anyone anything new. Why was such an obvious article written? For what purpose. Certainly not to teach engineers to be nice to poor people. That's obvious... no need to teach them.
It should be basic, but it isn't. And more's the pity.
I didn't read (nor do I intend to) the article.
I have no idea why an article I didn't write (or read, for that matter) was written. Perhaps that's something you might ask the author.
>It was written to make you feel better about yourself and your relative position to the people you step on everyday when they clean your toilet because you can't clean it yourself.
If you say so. But as I didn't read the article, it doesn't make me feel anything.
I'd add that I'm kind and polite to people not because they have something I want, but because I respect other humans and myself.
>>I'm not telling you what to do, think or say, but I hope i never meet you.
>How ironic. Being kind is basic knowledge. Yet you say something like this while purporting to be kind... even though it's quite obvious we are unlikely to ever meet. Why waste energy to say something we both know? Why did you say something so obvious?
Because your comment appeared to not only demean those who clean up after you, but also to beat up on others because you think that being kind to such folks isn't sincere.
It's been my experience (I'm more than half a century old) that when folks ascribe motivations to other people, that reflects the motivations of the speaker rather than the recipient.
As such, I can only assume that you feel that way. I don't want to interact with folks like that. Hence my statement.
I didn't say that to be mean, as I have no interest or stake in your personal emotional state.
Rather, I said it because I don't want to be around folks who present themselves as the only arbiters of other peoples' motivations and feelings.
>You said it to be mean. While pretending not to be mean. Why? Because it makes you feel better.
Your assertion doesn't make it true. I don't need to make others feel bad (or have others make me feel good) to feel good about myself.
I try to live my life as a decent, kind person. I don't always succeed, but I do my best. And that's enough for me.
I know people who are much richer than me. I don't feel patronized when they say Hi to me.
The fact that a person is doing a lower paid job doesn't mean that others are stepping on them.
I don't know why it is such a different situation.
The person you choose to ignore might not agree with you on either of those points, but you don’t let yourself find that out because you won’t talk to them. It might do you good to second guess yourself now and then, in order to escape these local minima.
The important things are:
a) don't ignore (just in the same way you won't ignore any other person, it's not a status thing, just a human thing)
b) don't patronize - the comments in this thread and the general "be nice to poor people" has a feel good condescension written all over it, which you're rightly calling out. But it is possible (and baseline important) to be respectful to anyone and not be condescending.
Feel good condescension is exactly my point. It's the perfect phrase to illustrate what I'm trying to say. Thanks.
https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-being-rich-ish-lesso...
That is - you may feel much more awkward about the wealth disparity than the janitor himself does.
Also, please follow the HN guidelines - the guidelines were created to help encourage intelligent discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My comment wasn't flagged. I wasn't rude. I just have a different opinion then you. And you are misinterpreting that difference in opinion as rude.
I know there are lots of TV shows and movies about this, so it’s not a novel idea or anything, and I understand the potential for it to backfire, but I can’t overstate the cooperative benefits of gratitude if you really understand and appreciate what it is everyone is contributing.
I wouldn't make it a "trading places" thing. I'd like to see a full semester of retail work and a full semester of food service work be a requirement to get a bachelor's degree. I've done both, and for far longer than a semester each. One thing it taught me was to never get angry at someone who's trying to help me.
when they do i've found that it's worth listening, they sometimes have very interesting things to say.
same used to go for nyc cab drivers, although it's a bit different in the uber era. i have a book sitting on my shelf that was written (and self promoted) by a cab driver.
Especially if that person was just berated or humiliated by someone "important" on a power trip, extremely stressed by the job, or is preoccupied with personal issues that you have no idea about.
I've been in that position before.
I think privilieged people that don't have the same kind of stressors in their life that working class people frequently have, can then scoff when that person doesn't have the time or energy for a conversation, as if they expect those beneath them to entertain them with conversation in addition to their job duties.
It's surprising how much taking 5 seconds to say "Hi, how's it going" can improve any interaction.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
(Attributed to Maya Angelou)
It's one of those things so obvious once you know. Not like I was anywhere near a total jerk beforehand, but it changed how I approached lots of different interactions.
If anyone ever thinks taking out the trash is an unimportant job, try living without rubbish collection for a week. Suddenly it will become very important!
Show some appreciation for these people doing a very laborious and repetitive job for minimal pay, often outside regular business hours, and so probably cuts into their family time.
> He knows the janitors, cafeteria workers, everyone. He knows their names, the names of their family members, where they're in school, and he is viewed by the law clerks of all the justices as the most accessible of the court's members.
1: https://www.npr.org/2011/10/11/141246695/clarence-thomas-inf...
Before anyone jumps up & objects: yes, there are a lot of homeless who don't want to talk to you, or who are downright dangerous. You can avoid those.
The real homeless people are doing their best to blend into the background and not to look homeless.
[I used to be such a person]
Up next in a techbro blog post: "I have discovered that money doesn't buy happiness, and that being an asshole isn't a good thing."
I’m saying this being from a nation where employing household cooks, maids etc is norm once a certain income threshold is crossed, and where owing to really high inequities human labor is extremely low cost.
That said I don't think the piece is that bad because the author at least genuinely seems to try and to be kind, there are quite a few people in the industry who are genuinely callous.
There are so many articles shared here on developer depression, burn out and so on. Maybe you should try speaking with some actual janitors, some of them do quite ok. Maybe some are actually happy, because now they have a job to support their family and are not on the run anymore. Or they did not bind their happines to their bank account and find meaning elsewhere. Or maybe they rather do cleaning, than feeling proud to know how to game SEO and flood the world with shitty adds or alike.
They can’t afford families because they can barely afford to rent a room in a basement an hour from the office. Sometimes they share a bedroom so they can send some money back to a developing country I guess?
If they were born early enough to be home owners then they probably increase their net worth by more than me every year and it makes me feel like shit for losing the real estate lottery
It is to some people.
> Has tech come so far that we have to re-teach ourselves the basics and then brag about how we smile at "service staff"?
Nothing about this is at all unique to tech.
I'd assume there's a lot more new money in tech than in traditional industry?
I would highly recommend trying to get to know the "janitors!"
Even the few janitors that speak English are both rushed to complete their tasks in the insufficient allotted time and almost terrified to talk to the normal employees, presumably due to the perceived power balance - were an employee to complain about them, the vendor would almost certainly fire them rather than risk offending the client. It's not fair, but it is reality, and it means that even when I do say hello or hold a door or whatever I don't get a response.
I'm sure they find it condescending. This whole post is kind of condescending TBH.
One of the interesting things I've found while travelling is the different forms of interaction with customer service, hospitality, custodial staff. US tends to have a 'customer is always right' sickly sweet interactions. China has custodial staff that almost live at the office (the feel of Mum doing the dishes and washing, and that you're almost in their house). France/Paris you always say hello (bon jour) when you enter the store or it's rude. I've never had such "rude" blunt interactions as I did in Sofia, and thought it was me/tourist/english, but no, I witnessed equally gruff dismissive interactions for locals.
I studied mathematics in Prague in 1996-2003. More than once I met a janitor or a taxi driver who, albeit with a heavy Russian or Ukrainian accent, knew what a uniformly continuous function was and what does the Chinese Remainder Theorem say.
New (US) grads have significantly less qualifications than anyone wants to admit. It's getting 2 years of experience that makes the difference.
When looking to hire people from South America, there was lots of manufacturing experience, but we needed Design experience.
When we hired CAD guys, they followed directions fine, but possibly too literally or would stop too prematurely. When getting local, non engineers to do CAD, they would read our mind more.
Not that this is a show stopper. If we met 3 times a day for a quick meeting with our SA CAD guys, we achieved just as much. It just required more meetings/phone calls.
Sad stories...
But on the plus side, the size of the tech sector in 2022 does make for much more efficient job market for technical skills, than in decades past.
I would hope someone with a doctorate in mechanical engineering, who used to design jet engines, would be able adapt their skills to go work somewhere like Tesla, or a self-driving car company, or any other similar startup.
You typically will make a single part. Maybe its the plastic to cover the car's metal. Maybe its the screen user interfaces with, maybe its airbags. Whatever the case, the plastic and screens are deemed necessary by society to sell a car. Some mechanical engineer will have this job.
At least you make cars right? Well there are over 20 major car companies, if your company disappeared tomorrow, life would move on with minimal interruptions.
The most you can claim is that you are forcing the automotive industry to be ultra competitive.
Strangely enough, startups/Tesla is the last place someone with advanced mechanical engineering knowledge would go. From a quality/feature standpoint, new companies have lower standards. Where an established company would be pushing technology and doing things that no one has done before, new companies are just trying to build a car. It would be a resume hit, because you worked on outdated/low tech.
The most you could hope for is additional responsibility and less red tape. I know a manager who was elevated to a director for taking a job at a start-up.
Seems like the opposite has happened. Tesla, in its desperate attempt to stay alive(3-4 bankruptcy scares thus far) have found a niche where other OEMs didn't have expertise in (EVs) and really gone all out in innovation in areas where other OEMs have dropped the ball. In the car industry if you are a newcomer and you are just trying to "build a car" you are wasting your time/money and you will die. There needs to be a competitive advantage that claws people away from existing OEMs. I'd argue that the reason Tesla is clawing people away from the luxury brands. as well as getting people to move upmarket from the economy brands is the quality and innovation of their product in areas where typical OEM does not prioritize. Things such as software, day to day experience etc.
In terms of internal engineering, there are innovations as well. For example: The superbottle and octopump system utilize software and clever engineering to eliminate a complete coolant loop in the system. This eliminated parts, made the system more efficient and reduced cost. Tesla didn't have the organizational baggage plus they attracted some brilliant and dedicated engineers to make it happen.
There are many more documented examples of this.
Only for outsiders.
In the industry you realize it's cutting corners and the end customer has a worse product.
There was a short lived perception that Tesla was doing innovation, but as the quality issues came up, it appears as cutting corners.
Tesla has a marketing effect that companies dream of. That was likely what confused industry insiders of innovation. That has been gone since ~2018.
An efficient job market where people are matched with jobs suitable for their skills, is always a good thing.
https://learn.trakstar.com/blog/janitors-with-phds
“don’t trust anyone who’s nice to me but rude to the waiter. Because they would treat me the same way if I were in that position.”
Not everyone wants the silence to be punctuated with smalltalk.
Needless to say that being polite is out of the question here, and that I am sure that the author's intentions are not what I just commented, but I can't help to read it that way.
I would agree that "please" and "thank you" can take you far, however you don't just have to address them to the janitor, it's for everybody.
This is implied to be a bad thing... but is it really that important? My work is still work even when others don't validate me for it.
Also, the first shop I found [0] has stopped all international shipping due to Brexit.
I'm sure there's some sort of joke or lesson here.
[0] https://www.sensorydirect.com/mood-bands-pack-of-3
I don't know all the names of the security and janitorial folks, but I do know a few.