Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nameisname 1527 days ago
I think it's real and it makes sense. Look at the post. It reads borderline iamverysmart. He says people who work way harder making making less money but clearly has something going on with his own brain to assume that. I know someone whose worked hard their entire life and they run a small CNC shop. They're a multi millionaire. I know people who are software developers who bust their ass 12-16 hours a day for half of my own salary at the same company. The OPs issue is 100% their own issue and they have to work through it. Superiority complex is strong.
1 comments

It's easy to find counter-examples of both non-technologists who who work hard and are rich and people, and technologists who work hard and are poor, but that doesn't disprove that there are, as OP observed, a huge segment people in society who do work much harder and are paid much less than your typical technologist.

Years ago I did an internship in an emergency room to gain a certain medical qualification, and there I saw first hand people who worked much, much harder than I for much less pay. And they are saving lives while I write useless enterprise bloatware. Feeling that there might be something wrong with this dynamic is not a sign of a superiority complex, it's a sign of empathy and humility.

That the root comment was a GPT-3 generated post was the most charitable interpretation. The other is that it's some kind of flamebait.

> You might say I "deserve" my current place in life. Nothing has been handed to me, and I'm unusually smart and hard working. But I believe that I was born smart, and I've always had a compulsion to work hard.

> I feel uncomfortable interacting with people of lower social classes.

I think these are the parts that one might read less as "a sign of empathy and humility", and skew more towards "superiority".

People who are known for their aptitude for empathy and humility are more likely to see people as individuals (rather than placing them into bins such as "people of lower social class"), and less likely to assume that their personal life experience is comprehensive enough to make definitive-sounding statements on pretty subjective matters (such as classifying themselves as "unusually smart", where "smart" is a contentious thing to quantify at the best of times, or saying "nothing has been handed to me", when it's rather likely they're the beneficiary of at least some amount of privilege). I think this is what codingdave is referring to.