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>people at white collar jobs are generally happier than people at blue collar jobs (let me add that I hate this way of classifying jobs, but it comes pretty han

>people at white collar jobs are generally happier than people at blue collar jobs (let me add that I hate this way of classifying jobs, but it comes pretty handy for my current discussion). This seems like a clear result of what I just mentioned. Blue collar workers definitely work for money. They most probably aren’t aligned with their employers or companies’ goals, and they see their jobs as monotone means for making a living, without a mission in mind. I dunno, I was pretty satisfied at my last 'blue collar' job with everything but the money and the hours. I got to make things every day rich people paid tens of thousands of dollars for, I got to operate and maintain large expensive machines, we all had pretty much complete autonomy, we just followed the schedule, each did our part and made some really nice things. The people I worked with were all great, there was no 'office politics' bullshit, no manager fuckery, we all just showed up every day and got things done. Our goals aligned with the owners, make the customers happy so the business kept getting work and we all kept getting paid. Everyone that worked there really cared about the business and worked hard to make it successful. Leaving that place was honestly one of the harder things i've done in my life. It was a sad day when I left.

taneq 7y ago
I spend a lot of time with 'blue collar' tradespeople, and from everything I can see, they enjoy their jobs more than most 'white collar' people. There's far less decision fatigue, stress about long term decisions made with too little information, and feeling responsibility for things outside of your control. The emphasis is more on bite-sized, straightforward chunks of work that you can finish in a day or two and feel good about it. I'm sure there are non-technical office jobs that lack the 'white collar' pitfalls I've listed above, but they all seem to involve dealing with far too many people.
- inviromentalist 7y ago
  Midnight shift in the factory was fun.. Day shift was supposed to be a promotion. But there was so much Union politics.
- jolmg 7y ago
  Yeah, as a white-collar I sometimes wish I had a job like that, doing welding or similar. Not that I don't like my job, but doing straightforward physical work like you describe sounds nice.
  - arbol 7y ago
    I think physical is the key point here. Physical activity creates endorphins which make us happier. The current state of office jobs is resulting in chronically sedentary people who don't benefit from this.
    - jolmg 7y ago
      Well, it being physical is certainly part of it, but it's not all. There's also the point that most of the time, it's predictable. For example, you come in and you have to weld up a particular structure. I think one would be able to foresee how the whole thing is going to go down, including details, and how long it's going to take. Compare that to coming in and having to figure out some bugs on a software system. It's investigative work. You might figure them all out in an hour or you might get stuck in the first one for the whole day. You might end up staring into space wondering for who knows how long what kind of detail you're missing that would explain the behavior you're seeing. You have no idea how your day is going to pan out, and that is kind of fatiguing and/or stressful. There is no certainty in how much progress you'll make.
- taneq 7y ago
  (Too late to edit, but:) Another thought is that while job security in any given job is often lower (a lot of blue collar work is casual or short fixed term contracts), job security in the sense of knowing you'll have a job six months from now is arguably higher. Blue collar work is far more fungible than knowledge work, but that increases job mobility more than it increases replaceability because replacing a good employee is always a pain. The net result is more freedom to move jobs if you find yourself in an unpleasant environment.
  - iamthepieman 7y ago
    This is a good point. For me, the inertia around getting a job in the tech sector is a big impediment to happiness. I am not currently happy in my job but it takes so long to find a good company, filter out the chop shops, find a good cultural fit and then the actual interview process which will take a month just for one company. Multiply that by however many companies it takes to find a fit. All for a risky proposition that you may enjoy working at the new company more. I'm sure it's different in Silicon Valley but I don't and never want to live there. My brother has a job in the U.S. Virgin Islands doing construction work on resorts. He has a house and cook paid for by his employer and goes fishing on a friends boat or has beach side barbecues in the evenings. He works 9-10 hour days but never brings work home and makes almost as much as I do when you factor in that he doesn't pay for housing or most of his food.
- 0x445442 7y ago
  Matthew Crawford has some good thoughts on this subject. He posits that the agency afforded an individual by working with their hands is something that, by and large, has been lost. He also touches on the liberation of working on things where the result is easily measurable and not open for debate. For reference, he quit his white collar career to open a motorcycle repair shop and he offers the following as an archetypal example. When you're repairing a motorcycle the end result speaks for itself, it either runs properly or it doesn't. This is often in stark contrast to the white collar world where, not only, long term decisions are made with too little information but most things are outside our outside your control. Agency contrasted with lack of agency.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >I'm sure there are non-technical office jobs that lack the 'white collar' pitfalls I've listed above, Sure, but then we have our own issues. Highly repetitive work, sharing desks, open offices where team leads are in the back of every row to watch our every move, paperwork for this, paperwork for that, gotta print this out and hand write this then have another person scan it in at some point so you can do this, this is on one doc in the case but it is marked wrong so you get to virtual print it back into the case as the appropriate doc and it's not the fault of whoever scanned it originally it's your fault for not noticing they did it wrong but they're gonna get penalized as much as you. When I mess something up it's quite literally like Office Space - I hear from my senior coordinator, I hear from my team lead, I'll get a file referral issued by someone I've never met in another state that my team lead then tells me about again and I have to review it and agree to it with whatever my team lead tells me to because God forbid I get to dispute it and explain my logic, then I get to hear about it again during my monthly meeting with my manager and then for our annual merit review I'll hear about it as a statistic "sorry, you only get a 2 out of 4 here because you had that mistake 9 months ago even though you look at hundreds to thousands of pages of paperwork a day while trying to make quota. You now get even less of a sub-inflation merit based increase for the next fiscal year!" Don't have a degree like me? Congrats, All but two of the managers and all but one or two of the team leads have been here as little as half as long as you making considerably more than you. Oh, your friend that moved to 3rd shift, they now make at least 15% more than you because of shift differential for doing the same job and oh, they've been here half as long as you and... are a team lead. Oh, and, we're going to stop funding the pension with a % of your income and instead we're going to add 2 more % of match range to the 401k even though you can't afford to even get the full match now! Oh, and remember how you used to get all of your vacation June 1st each year (start of the fiscal year), well we know that's how we did it the first 12 years you were here but now for the 13th and beyond you have to earn your time weekly and oh, it still doesn't' roll over. Use it or lose it sucka. Oh, yes, we haven't given a cost of living increase in a decade but it's ok our CEO took $15.96 million in total compensation in FY 2019, down from $16.67 million in FY 2018 so we're trying to save money! Don't feel so bad about only make 0.2% of what he did, everyone's struggling! It's cool though, I only have to work here until I die since retirement isn't realistic. If sharing desks doesn't give me a potentially fatal bacteria or virus since we're highly discouraged from calling in sick and we work in an office where people urinate on the floor, defecate on the toilet seats, leave blood on toilet seats/floors and pick & stick boogers on every surface in the bathroom then between the strong smell of mold in the building every time it rains and the jet exhaust coming in the doors on windy days I'll die long before my dotage. Visiting the OpenAI office 2 years ago ruined my life. Clean offices, everyone was calm and quietly working, no overlords passive aggressively staring at you if you were talking, catered meals twice a day, no smell of mold, no one coughing and sneezing without covering their mouths, was offered water (from a bottle! It wasn't even milky white, I'm not kidding you our tap water is milky white the first several seconds) by the nicest security guard ever. I thought I'd died and gone to job nirvana. I was just visiting someone though for a quick meeting unrelated to OpenAI, alas I had to return to my bottom rung office job where I'm a replaceable serial number and not a human being. At least I'm not digging graves anymore though, sun poisoning sucked.
- vsareto 7y ago
  I don't think many white collar jobs have as much of that stress as you'd think. There are definitely some high stress jobs because of their effects on other people (doctors, lawyers, etc), but there are also some incredibly low stress white collar jobs that nearly put people into catatonic boredom. Getting a job that can be automated, but your boss doesn't realize it can be automated, is a good example. Automating some of these jobs can require as little effort as learning Python for 2-3 months and hacking together some scripts. Blue collar workers likely have a higher attention floor - due to safety reasons around large machines usually. Some white collar jobs can be slept through.
  - pythonaut_16 7y ago
    So your advice for low stress white collar work is... find one that you can automate easily so you don't have to do it?
    - pingyong 7y ago
      The problem is then you still have to go there and pretend to work - sitting in front of a screen for 8 hours while doing nothing probably sucks the life right out of you.
    - pc86 7y ago
      You certainly wouldn't be the first one to do it!
    - Tarsul 7y ago
      I mean my job is a little bit like that. I have automated a lot of annoying stuff with VBA (but have yet to start with python, it's on my todo list). However, it's impossible to automate everything - so in the end a worker is necessary (but not the hours that were planned). I would assume it's the same for many white collar jobs. [since I'm paid by the hour the automatization is not really worth it monetarily by itself, but that's another discussion] Another aspect regarding agency and happiness: I've noticed that I have some (kind of stupid/gameified) sense of accomplishment when I sort my mails, write down the current status of a project or something similarly "boring" but important stuff for ease of mind (similar to doing a todo-list to become organized). Just knowing (and accomplishing) that everything is in order is quite satisfying.
- collyw 7y ago
  I am pretty sure that depends on the workplace. There are plenty of stories about Amazon warehouses that sound pretty bad.
esoterica 7y ago
No "office politics" is the result of having no possibility of career advancement, which is probably not a good thing. When nobody has any path to promotion then nobody will bother playing games to get promoted.
- jolmg 7y ago
  I think it's just that blue-collar work is naturally more visible. Quality of work (not to mention quantity) can be appreciated with just a few glances of the work. So, it's not that there's no possibility of career advancement. It's just that "office politics" is not as needed. That's my perspective, anyway.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    Career advancement from welder to senior welder, yes. To go from laborer to site manager, that's not the only thing that needs evaluating. If nobody is looking at your people skills, then you probably don't have that second promotion available.
    - jolmg 7y ago
      I can see people not wanting that second promotion. It sounds like it would be at least partly a different job, requiring orthogonal skills like you mentioned. I would imagine one can stay a welder and improve to a point where they would earn even more than site managers. Like, there's welders that can weld garden gates, then there's welders that can work on underwater pipes, then I imagine organizations like NASA need even further skilled welders. I don't think there's ever a need to transition to managing subordinates.
      - CaptArmchair 7y ago
        That's exactly how this works. A career can move horizontally or vertically. What most people forget is that "moving up the ladder" isn't a promotion: it's a fundamental career change that requires vastly different skills. Being a fine engineer or technician doesn't make you fit for a leadership position where people skills make all the difference. And once you're in such a role, your operational experience will go stale after a while since you can't spend vast amounts of time deep diving in concrete technical problems. Your job is to manage the overall picture and delegate. Here's a nice blogpost from Charity Majors (Honeycomb) about this exact conundrum: https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/ https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe... The crux to this is that it's actually fine to not climb the ladder. Like you said, you can perfectly hone your skills over years, establish a name for yourself and become a specialist who gets paid more then their boss Doing that still requires a due acumen to manage your own career as if it were a personal business. Which means scouting for opportunities that help you earn more while allowing you to work on new challenging projects that help you expand your technical experience. Hence why hopping jobs isn't necessarily a bad thing for your career. Of course, that's not what employers want or need. That's why they play the loyalty or career card. And why this myth "climbing the ladder is a good thing" persists. Let's not forget, most people stick to their jobs not because they are particularly fond of their jobs, but because of household debt (children, car, house, student loans,...) or because there simply aren't attractive alternatives close by and moving / migrating is too expensive (emotionally, culturally, socially,...). Finally, office politics and workplace culture are an aggregate and a compound sum, not just of organizational policies, but also of what employees bring to the table, where they are individually in their lives, what they need now and in the future, and which cost opportunity trade offs they are willing / choosing to make.
crispinb 7y ago
The blue-collar jobs I had in my early 20s were the only jobs I've ever been remotely happy in. They were all relaxed & itinerant kind of things (forestry, farming, driving, fairgrounds). I suppose (but am not sure) I would have grown tired of that kind of life eventually. But I have truly loathed every microsecond of every white collar job I later took on, for a variety of reasons. I'm relatively immune to envy on the whole, but I do admit to it for people who have found satisfaction in work (not that I have known many).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- OJFord 7y ago
  > I suppose (but am not sure) I would have grown tired of that kind of life eventually. Rather than mental or emotional fatigue, more of a problem can be injury, or accelerated decline in fitness to do the physical work after labouring for years; while still needing the job for money.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    My guess is that this would vary much between types of occupations. I can see that occupations involving highly repetitive actions (assembly line work etc) might cause problems. Many more varied, often outdoor, manual jobs strike me as putting a human fairly close to the kinds of activities for which our body evolved. Anecdotally, every single fit, strong & able old person I've known has been a manual worker. Case in point: 90 year lifelong builder currently doing roofing work. 87 year old (my sailing instructor!) currently running (on the ground) his tree surgery business. Most lifelong office workers I know are barrel shaped and essentially disabled by their 50s. The stats might be interesting, though I suspect they'd be pretty complex, different by region & nation, and highly confounded (by class, lifestyle, etc).
- karatestomp 7y ago
  I'd rather do handyman-type work. Or just about anything in a state or national park. I'd probably be better at it, too (in that I'd give a half a fuck). But a middling software developer building things 80% of which never make a return or are thrown away before anyone sees them, still makes a ton more money than someone fixing doors or putting in tile floors, or running campgrounds and replacing trail markers. So. Here I am and here I've (very nearly) always been. The non-tech job I had for one Summer is probably my favorite job I've ever had, pay aside. Paid minimum wage or just over.
cortesoft 7y ago
Well > White collar workers, or at least the ones I’ve met which curiously all had clear missions, on the other hand, see their jobs as a challenge and a mean to reach their personal goals. The miserable white collar workers don't feel like talking about work to some guy on a 'mission'.
- ansgri 7y ago
  I also thought about selection bias right away. Tired people probably avoid these energetic ‘activists’ altogether.
epicgiga 7y ago
I have a similar story from an old acquaintance. He used to work in finance, quit his job in his late 20s, and went to work moving stuff around a warehouse in the outback during the mining boom. He did this for two years. He said he absolutely loved it. There was no stress. He just lifted things, got big and strong, and went home everyday tired in body but relaxed and happy in mind. It's the stress and psychological torment that does you in. This is why I feel genuinely sad when I see guys grinding away at their high paid, stressful, draining, and often psychopathic corporate jobs, who blow all of the salary. That's just messed up. My savings target is always 50% or more. If you're never going to be free of it, what's the point? Should we all not be trying to buy our freedoms? Rather than handing chains to landlords and bosses and bankers? Like an old boss of mine, who was getting paid more than all of us, and yet when he switched job, he left us on Friday and started there on Monday. By his own words, he spent 99 dollars of every hundred he made, so couldn't afford to do otherwise. Personal margin is everything. If your job takes all your energy, and you spend all its money, you're trapped. You have no bargaining power (you can't walk away), and you'll never move to positions with less stress, less politics, less hours, better and more interesting work, or more pay. This is such a critical concept that it's crazy people aren't being taught it at school.
- neilalexander 7y ago
  > My savings target is always 50% or more. This is a pipe-dream for most workers. Salaries just aren't high enough in many industries or places in the world to be able to put away 50% of your earnings and still live comfortably (or even not comfortably).
  - epicgiga 7y ago
    Place in the world doesn't affect margin (%) -- if you work in London you'll make more than in Lahore, but your landlord is making the same "more" in turn. The goal isn't to live comfortably, it's to live minimally, to open up margin so you can spend time upskilling and trying to get higher paying jobs. I get that 50% is hard. I don't enjoy it myself, but I've been broke before and I've had really crap jobs before and so now it's fear that makes me save that rate. Rather than having my apartment be twice the size, I'll take a smaller one and funnel the surplus into my skills and my business pursuits, which in turn raises income and thus margin further, in a virtuous cycle. I just don't buy all the people saying a few percent is the absolute best they can do. Usually they're buying things, which I get -- the pleasure of those things are like the "reward" of the painful work hours. I think if they tried harder they could hit at least 25%. After a year that gives you a 4month runway -- a world of difference if you lose your job vs a 1 week runway. At a minimum, everyone should work out what their genuine subsistence level is, so they know what they're spending on comfort.
iamthepieman 7y ago
Originally, I never intended to go to college after high school. I got my GED, and went from working part time at a furniture shop to full time. We made classic inspired case pieces, tables, chairs etc. We used machines but all finished surfaces were hand detailed using a hand plane, chisel, rasp or scraper. I have never enjoyed a job more. Even after entering the tech field, I have held part time jobs (not sure if they qualify as blue collar but certainly not office jobs). One as a barista and one as a personal trainer. Again, I have enjoyed those jobs more than anything else I have done. Feedback is immediate: a smile on someone's face, a beautiful curve in a hand carved detail, high-fives after group fitness class. Or, negatively: "this tastes weird/I didn't order this", a chip or crack or blemish in the finish, grimacing in pain. Most of what I do, no one ever appreciates or even looks at. It will never be seen, even my superiors only care about the end result. I could write it in brainfuck and PHP4 and they would never even know. If the kitchen is dirty, it's noticeable to everyone. If the project is dirty, from technical debt, only I see that. If I say "We need a new espresso machine because this one is broken and that's the second time this month" Everyone understands and if I say that I actually fixed it myself to get it to limp along for another month then that's going above and beyond. If I say "We need a new backend because ours was written by someone who hasn't worked here in 5 years and it takes us 4 hours to deploy" then everyone wonders what's wrong with me and why can't I just make it work. And If I say I added some shims and interfaces to allow us to gradually change it instead of replacing it wholesale, that's wasting time.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  I really, really, really wish I'd got a degree in my late teens/early 20's. I unloaded 100 bitcoin for some WoW gold one time but if I had a time machine for one use I'd go back and tell me at 18 to get a degree and not even mention the crypto, I'd have had a better life. Highschool -> GED > switched from part time to full time retail [1] -> grave digger/grounds keeper [2] -> full time retail [3] -> contractor for CBP [4] -> current job [5]. [1] Best Buy was ok. We were the product processing team so we had to throw the trucks, stock everything, reset the planograms, load heavy stuff, get stuff down stored up top etc. There were 4 of us, there were supposed to be 9 of us so we had to bust ass and it got pretty tiring. [2] Minimum wage was 6$ and change, I was making 10! Outside 50-60 hours a day with no shade, got sun poisoning, had to bury a high school kid, had to bury an infant, would regularly sit in freshly dug graves just to cool down and get out of the sun for a few minutes and climb out before my boss would notice, if I had a fresh grave I'd usually eat my lunch in it too for the same reasons. Showed up at work one day working my way towards sun poisoning again and parked my truck. Sat there for a minute, put it in reverse and left and called the office guy and said sorry man I'm not coming back. [3] I honestly loved everything at Lowes but the pay and the random hours. There was a guy that had a full time job, he only wanted to close. I didn't mind opening and would have been fine with opening and throwing the truck for the departments (hardware, always had to help tools because old guys). So what did they do? "Hey Larry we need you to open, Ryan you're closing"... blinks [4] Got paid a fraction of what the federal employees did, took over the desk of a woman who had retired and apparently had stopped doing anything more than a year before and left a mess, was given zero training on SAP or what I was supposed to be doing and was given a single sheet of paper with some photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy of some screenshots showing me vaguely what to do, the CPA was never in the office if it was nice out as he'd clock in and go play golf, the manager would come in and turn her light on, close the blinds on her window and either leave or just not answer her phone/door, guy across from my cubicle would come over to talk and sit in my extra chair and fall asleep every single day but he did manage to help me sorta figure out what I was supposed to be doing, DHS and other federal and state agencies were in the news for mismanaging funds and doing stuff like buying 2k$ bullet proof vests for dogs in Podunk, Middleamerica population 19 so put in a 30 day notice figuring I'd find a job quick. [5] 13 weeks after my last week at CBP got hired by FTN, been here for 13 3/4 years. Same position I hired in to, although now on my 3rd job title as they change it every few years company-wide. Don't have a degree, only a GED, FedEx wants 4-year degrees minimum for everything. Been here twice as long as all 3 of my team leads, yes I have three team leads. The 3 people on my team immediately higher than me have been here 1/5-1/3 as long as me. 3rd shift makes 15% more than us so new hires start almost at what I make. If you want to move up you need a degree and if you want to be a manager (4 steps above me) you have to be willing to move to another state for (likely) years like my current manager (my 4th manager to date) had to. We share desks with another shift, I had one former desk mate management had to throw the entire contents of their drawer away and some of my stuff because they wore the same shirt every single day at work and kept it in their drawer between shifts, for years, and it smelled horrible because they'd go out and walk in the heat and humidity on their lunch and sweat it up. I had another desk mate that would pick and stick boogers on the monitor frame, the tower, underneath the desk, the stapler (we also have the walls covered by the urinals, and in the stalls, in both men's bathrooms from pick and stickers). Every year at best I can manage about 3% merit increase, I don't think I've ever actually got 3%. They just nuked our pensions to up 401k match, I already can't afford to contribute enough to get the match they had before let alone the new match. Insurance usually goes up more than my merit increase, 2019 I made 2k$ and change less than 2018 thanks to zero over time available. They said they were going to bring a bunch more jobs here so more room for advancement, instead they opened 2 satellite offices in other states. There are now people in those office that have been here 6-12 months that are now higher than me because they had to quick promote them. Realistically I will have to work here until I die as this job doesn't translate to anything else and I'm about to turn 35 without a degree. If I tried to get a degree I'd be 42ish probably and probably fail a few classes before I got used to school after being absent from it for half of my life. I'd then be 42ish going for entry level work with 40-60k$ in debt. I'd probably pay it off by 55ish, meaning I'd have 5-15 years to try and make up on 30-40 years of missed retirement contributions. If I don't die before then, cancer killed my father in his 40's and his mother in her 50's, my mother had cancer in her late 50's. Hate my job, completely dead end yet know I'm stuck here dealing with more and more absurdity until I die. Fun times.
artsyca 7y ago
The first thing we talk about is the clothing we wear to work, that is poignant A lot of tech workers would classify themselves as neither white nor blue-collar because they wear t-shirts thus eschewing the whole conversation whereas technically they'd probably fall into the whitecollar category during any other phase of human history That in itself is the greatest cause of grief in this field the sore lack of common professional manners ethics and customs that causes a total breakdown of communication and culture
- theFeller00 7y ago
  tech workers are about as close of an equal mix between white and blue as you get. it is modern assembly line trash
- BossingAround 7y ago
  > That in itself is the greatest cause of grief in this field the sore lack of common professional manners ethics and customs that causes a total breakdown of communication and culture Are you suggesting tech workers, e.g. your average programmer, is unhappy because he or she lacks customs and ethics, which breaks down communication with the outside world?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - artsyca 7y ago
    If there even is a she within a fifty metre radius yes I'm telling you that so called tech workers aka code monkeys have graduated straight from the dorm to the open office and have no clue about anything that happened prior to the invention of the soy latte much less how to function in the real world of adult professionalism
    - sfgjhsjkghf 7y ago
      I agree with much of your observations about the degradation of civilization, but your understanding is flawed. Going back to some caricature of the Victorian area, where everyone is forced by rigid constraints into the same cookie cutter mold, isn't the solution to society's problems, it's the cause of it. You posted this comment some time ago: > "I've been in the industry for a long while now long enough to be past the stage of proving myself and looking more towards creating something of lasting value for the world and society and even my own legacy. > "Everyone around me from management to the HR apparatus and even my peers seem geared towards me remaining a non client facing worker bot content with my perks and not harboring any ambitions beyond 'solving challenging problems' as a means to elicit that dopamine rush towards the collective ego > "Growing up I chose computer science because it wasn't supposed to feel like work it was supposed to be a calling a duty but now the whole system is geared towards blind compliance and disengagement > "My good people, how can I break the endless cycle of mindless mechanical labour that has become the software business and become the consummate professional I've always wanted to be?" That's a very good question! The question is, what do you think "professionalism" is, exactly? Everyone being forced into bondage-and-discipline compliance? Like the Schutzstaffel officers who patrol this site to quickly and effectively suppress opinions contrary to the group-think, via vigorous use of the ban hammer, resulting in people continually making throwaway accounts and even pushing them from honest commentary toward purposeful trolling, due to their incessantly growing contempt of a society that oppresses their thoughts and opinions and ideas about living? More oppression, more forced compliance to somebody's arbitrary 1950s ideals, is that the answer to solving all of this chaos, you think?
mapcars 7y ago
>people at white collar jobs are generally happier than people at blue collar jobs Happiness is only found within, all attempts to connect it to outside events or things will inevitably fail.
- edelans 7y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/kmicO6l.png http://i.imgur.com/kmicO6l.png
theFeller00 7y ago
I fucking hate programming. I would rather go back to labor jobs if the pay was the same. I would rather go back to fast food if it paid the same. I would rather go back to retail if it paid the same.
Diederich 7y ago
I'd love to hear more about what kinds of things you made and maintained.
logicalmind 7y ago
There always seems to be some romanticism of blue collar work from white collar, and vice versa. There is a thread of truth to the things each side says, but there is also a reality that is ignored. I'm from a blue collar family in a blue collar area and have known people from various blue collar professions. Risk and physical atrophy is very real for blue collar workers. In most trades you will work with equipment that can kill, injure and maim you. Even if you avoid the equipment (and your co-workers using the equipment in your vicinity), the physical toll of daily blue collar work is going to impact your body. Most blue collar workers I know have significant physical ailments which start in their 40's or 50's. Bad knees making it difficult to walk. Bad back making your life difficult in all kinds of ways. If you're lucky, you only end up with arthritic hands, making them useless and painful in old age. White collar work is filled with its own issues like sedentary lifestyle, sitting all day, eye strain, etc. But there is almost a zero percent chance if you getting killed or maimed by your equipment. You could definitely take pride in operating and maintaining large expensive machines, but you also face the reality of those machines removing your fingers, limbs, or taking your life. In blue collar work there is big heavy equipment, fumes/gas, extreme heat/cold, etc. I spent my teens and early 20's doing blue collar work (had no plans to go to college), until watching the people around me struggle physically in their 30's made me re-think that decision. Even in the limited time I spent in the trades, I still have lasting scars and injuries from things that happened to me. My scars from white collar work have only been emotional ones. I'm not belittling that, just pointing out that the grass isn't greener.
deleted 7y ago
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taneq 7y ago

I spend a lot of time with 'blue collar' tradespeople, and from everything I can see, they enjoy their jobs more than most 'white collar' people. There's far less decision fatigue, stress about long term decisions made with too little information, and feeling responsibility for things outside of your control. The emphasis is more on bite-sized, straightforward chunks of work that you can finish in a day or two and feel good about it. I'm sure there are non-technical office jobs that lack the 'white collar' pitfalls I've listed above, but they all seem to involve dealing with far too many people.

inviromentalist 7y ago
Midnight shift in the factory was fun.. Day shift was supposed to be a promotion. But there was so much Union politics.
jolmg 7y ago
Yeah, as a white-collar I sometimes wish I had a job like that, doing welding or similar. Not that I don't like my job, but doing straightforward physical work like you describe sounds nice.
- arbol 7y ago
  I think physical is the key point here. Physical activity creates endorphins which make us happier. The current state of office jobs is resulting in chronically sedentary people who don't benefit from this.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    Well, it being physical is certainly part of it, but it's not all. There's also the point that most of the time, it's predictable. For example, you come in and you have to weld up a particular structure. I think one would be able to foresee how the whole thing is going to go down, including details, and how long it's going to take. Compare that to coming in and having to figure out some bugs on a software system. It's investigative work. You might figure them all out in an hour or you might get stuck in the first one for the whole day. You might end up staring into space wondering for who knows how long what kind of detail you're missing that would explain the behavior you're seeing. You have no idea how your day is going to pan out, and that is kind of fatiguing and/or stressful. There is no certainty in how much progress you'll make.
taneq 7y ago
(Too late to edit, but:) Another thought is that while job security in any given job is often lower (a lot of blue collar work is casual or short fixed term contracts), job security in the sense of knowing you'll have a job six months from now is arguably higher. Blue collar work is far more fungible than knowledge work, but that increases job mobility more than it increases replaceability because replacing a good employee is always a pain. The net result is more freedom to move jobs if you find yourself in an unpleasant environment.
- iamthepieman 7y ago
  This is a good point. For me, the inertia around getting a job in the tech sector is a big impediment to happiness. I am not currently happy in my job but it takes so long to find a good company, filter out the chop shops, find a good cultural fit and then the actual interview process which will take a month just for one company. Multiply that by however many companies it takes to find a fit. All for a risky proposition that you may enjoy working at the new company more. I'm sure it's different in Silicon Valley but I don't and never want to live there. My brother has a job in the U.S. Virgin Islands doing construction work on resorts. He has a house and cook paid for by his employer and goes fishing on a friends boat or has beach side barbecues in the evenings. He works 9-10 hour days but never brings work home and makes almost as much as I do when you factor in that he doesn't pay for housing or most of his food.
0x445442 7y ago
Matthew Crawford has some good thoughts on this subject. He posits that the agency afforded an individual by working with their hands is something that, by and large, has been lost. He also touches on the liberation of working on things where the result is easily measurable and not open for debate. For reference, he quit his white collar career to open a motorcycle repair shop and he offers the following as an archetypal example. When you're repairing a motorcycle the end result speaks for itself, it either runs properly or it doesn't. This is often in stark contrast to the white collar world where, not only, long term decisions are made with too little information but most things are outside our outside your control. Agency contrasted with lack of agency.
ryanmercer 7y ago
>I'm sure there are non-technical office jobs that lack the 'white collar' pitfalls I've listed above, Sure, but then we have our own issues. Highly repetitive work, sharing desks, open offices where team leads are in the back of every row to watch our every move, paperwork for this, paperwork for that, gotta print this out and hand write this then have another person scan it in at some point so you can do this, this is on one doc in the case but it is marked wrong so you get to virtual print it back into the case as the appropriate doc and it's not the fault of whoever scanned it originally it's your fault for not noticing they did it wrong but they're gonna get penalized as much as you. When I mess something up it's quite literally like Office Space - I hear from my senior coordinator, I hear from my team lead, I'll get a file referral issued by someone I've never met in another state that my team lead then tells me about again and I have to review it and agree to it with whatever my team lead tells me to because God forbid I get to dispute it and explain my logic, then I get to hear about it again during my monthly meeting with my manager and then for our annual merit review I'll hear about it as a statistic "sorry, you only get a 2 out of 4 here because you had that mistake 9 months ago even though you look at hundreds to thousands of pages of paperwork a day while trying to make quota. You now get even less of a sub-inflation merit based increase for the next fiscal year!" Don't have a degree like me? Congrats, All but two of the managers and all but one or two of the team leads have been here as little as half as long as you making considerably more than you. Oh, your friend that moved to 3rd shift, they now make at least 15% more than you because of shift differential for doing the same job and oh, they've been here half as long as you and... are a team lead. Oh, and, we're going to stop funding the pension with a % of your income and instead we're going to add 2 more % of match range to the 401k even though you can't afford to even get the full match now! Oh, and remember how you used to get all of your vacation June 1st each year (start of the fiscal year), well we know that's how we did it the first 12 years you were here but now for the 13th and beyond you have to earn your time weekly and oh, it still doesn't' roll over. Use it or lose it sucka. Oh, yes, we haven't given a cost of living increase in a decade but it's ok our CEO took $15.96 million in total compensation in FY 2019, down from $16.67 million in FY 2018 so we're trying to save money! Don't feel so bad about only make 0.2% of what he did, everyone's struggling! It's cool though, I only have to work here until I die since retirement isn't realistic. If sharing desks doesn't give me a potentially fatal bacteria or virus since we're highly discouraged from calling in sick and we work in an office where people urinate on the floor, defecate on the toilet seats, leave blood on toilet seats/floors and pick & stick boogers on every surface in the bathroom then between the strong smell of mold in the building every time it rains and the jet exhaust coming in the doors on windy days I'll die long before my dotage. Visiting the OpenAI office 2 years ago ruined my life. Clean offices, everyone was calm and quietly working, no overlords passive aggressively staring at you if you were talking, catered meals twice a day, no smell of mold, no one coughing and sneezing without covering their mouths, was offered water (from a bottle! It wasn't even milky white, I'm not kidding you our tap water is milky white the first several seconds) by the nicest security guard ever. I thought I'd died and gone to job nirvana. I was just visiting someone though for a quick meeting unrelated to OpenAI, alas I had to return to my bottom rung office job where I'm a replaceable serial number and not a human being. At least I'm not digging graves anymore though, sun poisoning sucked.
vsareto 7y ago
I don't think many white collar jobs have as much of that stress as you'd think. There are definitely some high stress jobs because of their effects on other people (doctors, lawyers, etc), but there are also some incredibly low stress white collar jobs that nearly put people into catatonic boredom. Getting a job that can be automated, but your boss doesn't realize it can be automated, is a good example. Automating some of these jobs can require as little effort as learning Python for 2-3 months and hacking together some scripts. Blue collar workers likely have a higher attention floor - due to safety reasons around large machines usually. Some white collar jobs can be slept through.
- pythonaut_16 7y ago
  So your advice for low stress white collar work is... find one that you can automate easily so you don't have to do it?
  - pingyong 7y ago
    The problem is then you still have to go there and pretend to work - sitting in front of a screen for 8 hours while doing nothing probably sucks the life right out of you.
  - pc86 7y ago
    You certainly wouldn't be the first one to do it!
  - Tarsul 7y ago
    I mean my job is a little bit like that. I have automated a lot of annoying stuff with VBA (but have yet to start with python, it's on my todo list). However, it's impossible to automate everything - so in the end a worker is necessary (but not the hours that were planned). I would assume it's the same for many white collar jobs. [since I'm paid by the hour the automatization is not really worth it monetarily by itself, but that's another discussion] Another aspect regarding agency and happiness: I've noticed that I have some (kind of stupid/gameified) sense of accomplishment when I sort my mails, write down the current status of a project or something similarly "boring" but important stuff for ease of mind (similar to doing a todo-list to become organized). Just knowing (and accomplishing) that everything is in order is quite satisfying.
collyw 7y ago
I am pretty sure that depends on the workplace. There are plenty of stories about Amazon warehouses that sound pretty bad.

esoterica 7y ago

No "office politics" is the result of having no possibility of career advancement, which is probably not a good thing. When nobody has any path to promotion then nobody will bother playing games to get promoted.

jolmg 7y ago
I think it's just that blue-collar work is naturally more visible. Quality of work (not to mention quantity) can be appreciated with just a few glances of the work. So, it's not that there's no possibility of career advancement. It's just that "office politics" is not as needed. That's my perspective, anyway.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  Career advancement from welder to senior welder, yes. To go from laborer to site manager, that's not the only thing that needs evaluating. If nobody is looking at your people skills, then you probably don't have that second promotion available.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    I can see people not wanting that second promotion. It sounds like it would be at least partly a different job, requiring orthogonal skills like you mentioned. I would imagine one can stay a welder and improve to a point where they would earn even more than site managers. Like, there's welders that can weld garden gates, then there's welders that can work on underwater pipes, then I imagine organizations like NASA need even further skilled welders. I don't think there's ever a need to transition to managing subordinates.
    - CaptArmchair 7y ago
      That's exactly how this works. A career can move horizontally or vertically. What most people forget is that "moving up the ladder" isn't a promotion: it's a fundamental career change that requires vastly different skills. Being a fine engineer or technician doesn't make you fit for a leadership position where people skills make all the difference. And once you're in such a role, your operational experience will go stale after a while since you can't spend vast amounts of time deep diving in concrete technical problems. Your job is to manage the overall picture and delegate. Here's a nice blogpost from Charity Majors (Honeycomb) about this exact conundrum: https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/ https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe... The crux to this is that it's actually fine to not climb the ladder. Like you said, you can perfectly hone your skills over years, establish a name for yourself and become a specialist who gets paid more then their boss Doing that still requires a due acumen to manage your own career as if it were a personal business. Which means scouting for opportunities that help you earn more while allowing you to work on new challenging projects that help you expand your technical experience. Hence why hopping jobs isn't necessarily a bad thing for your career. Of course, that's not what employers want or need. That's why they play the loyalty or career card. And why this myth "climbing the ladder is a good thing" persists. Let's not forget, most people stick to their jobs not because they are particularly fond of their jobs, but because of household debt (children, car, house, student loans,...) or because there simply aren't attractive alternatives close by and moving / migrating is too expensive (emotionally, culturally, socially,...). Finally, office politics and workplace culture are an aggregate and a compound sum, not just of organizational policies, but also of what employees bring to the table, where they are individually in their lives, what they need now and in the future, and which cost opportunity trade offs they are willing / choosing to make.

crispinb 7y ago

The blue-collar jobs I had in my early 20s were the only jobs I've ever been remotely happy in. They were all relaxed & itinerant kind of things (forestry, farming, driving, fairgrounds). I suppose (but am not sure) I would have grown tired of that kind of life eventually. But I have truly loathed every microsecond of every white collar job I later took on, for a variety of reasons. I'm relatively immune to envy on the whole, but I do admit to it for people who have found satisfaction in work (not that I have known many).

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OJFord 7y ago
> I suppose (but am not sure) I would have grown tired of that kind of life eventually. Rather than mental or emotional fatigue, more of a problem can be injury, or accelerated decline in fitness to do the physical work after labouring for years; while still needing the job for money.
- crispinb 7y ago
  My guess is that this would vary much between types of occupations. I can see that occupations involving highly repetitive actions (assembly line work etc) might cause problems. Many more varied, often outdoor, manual jobs strike me as putting a human fairly close to the kinds of activities for which our body evolved. Anecdotally, every single fit, strong & able old person I've known has been a manual worker. Case in point: 90 year lifelong builder currently doing roofing work. 87 year old (my sailing instructor!) currently running (on the ground) his tree surgery business. Most lifelong office workers I know are barrel shaped and essentially disabled by their 50s. The stats might be interesting, though I suspect they'd be pretty complex, different by region & nation, and highly confounded (by class, lifestyle, etc).
karatestomp 7y ago
I'd rather do handyman-type work. Or just about anything in a state or national park. I'd probably be better at it, too (in that I'd give a half a fuck). But a middling software developer building things 80% of which never make a return or are thrown away before anyone sees them, still makes a ton more money than someone fixing doors or putting in tile floors, or running campgrounds and replacing trail markers. So. Here I am and here I've (very nearly) always been. The non-tech job I had for one Summer is probably my favorite job I've ever had, pay aside. Paid minimum wage or just over.

cortesoft 7y ago

Well > White collar workers, or at least the ones I’ve met which curiously all had clear missions, on the other hand, see their jobs as a challenge and a mean to reach their personal goals. The miserable white collar workers don't feel like talking about work to some guy on a 'mission'.

ansgri 7y ago
I also thought about selection bias right away. Tired people probably avoid these energetic ‘activists’ altogether.

epicgiga 7y ago

I have a similar story from an old acquaintance. He used to work in finance, quit his job in his late 20s, and went to work moving stuff around a warehouse in the outback during the mining boom. He did this for two years. He said he absolutely loved it. There was no stress. He just lifted things, got big and strong, and went home everyday tired in body but relaxed and happy in mind. It's the stress and psychological torment that does you in. This is why I feel genuinely sad when I see guys grinding away at their high paid, stressful, draining, and often psychopathic corporate jobs, who blow all of the salary. That's just messed up. My savings target is always 50% or more. If you're never going to be free of it, what's the point? Should we all not be trying to buy our freedoms? Rather than handing chains to landlords and bosses and bankers? Like an old boss of mine, who was getting paid more than all of us, and yet when he switched job, he left us on Friday and started there on Monday. By his own words, he spent 99 dollars of every hundred he made, so couldn't afford to do otherwise. Personal margin is everything. If your job takes all your energy, and you spend all its money, you're trapped. You have no bargaining power (you can't walk away), and you'll never move to positions with less stress, less politics, less hours, better and more interesting work, or more pay. This is such a critical concept that it's crazy people aren't being taught it at school.

neilalexander 7y ago
> My savings target is always 50% or more. This is a pipe-dream for most workers. Salaries just aren't high enough in many industries or places in the world to be able to put away 50% of your earnings and still live comfortably (or even not comfortably).
- epicgiga 7y ago
  Place in the world doesn't affect margin (%) -- if you work in London you'll make more than in Lahore, but your landlord is making the same "more" in turn. The goal isn't to live comfortably, it's to live minimally, to open up margin so you can spend time upskilling and trying to get higher paying jobs. I get that 50% is hard. I don't enjoy it myself, but I've been broke before and I've had really crap jobs before and so now it's fear that makes me save that rate. Rather than having my apartment be twice the size, I'll take a smaller one and funnel the surplus into my skills and my business pursuits, which in turn raises income and thus margin further, in a virtuous cycle. I just don't buy all the people saying a few percent is the absolute best they can do. Usually they're buying things, which I get -- the pleasure of those things are like the "reward" of the painful work hours. I think if they tried harder they could hit at least 25%. After a year that gives you a 4month runway -- a world of difference if you lose your job vs a 1 week runway. At a minimum, everyone should work out what their genuine subsistence level is, so they know what they're spending on comfort.

iamthepieman 7y ago

Originally, I never intended to go to college after high school. I got my GED, and went from working part time at a furniture shop to full time. We made classic inspired case pieces, tables, chairs etc. We used machines but all finished surfaces were hand detailed using a hand plane, chisel, rasp or scraper. I have never enjoyed a job more. Even after entering the tech field, I have held part time jobs (not sure if they qualify as blue collar but certainly not office jobs). One as a barista and one as a personal trainer. Again, I have enjoyed those jobs more than anything else I have done. Feedback is immediate: a smile on someone's face, a beautiful curve in a hand carved detail, high-fives after group fitness class. Or, negatively: "this tastes weird/I didn't order this", a chip or crack or blemish in the finish, grimacing in pain. Most of what I do, no one ever appreciates or even looks at. It will never be seen, even my superiors only care about the end result. I could write it in brainfuck and PHP4 and they would never even know. If the kitchen is dirty, it's noticeable to everyone. If the project is dirty, from technical debt, only I see that. If I say "We need a new espresso machine because this one is broken and that's the second time this month" Everyone understands and if I say that I actually fixed it myself to get it to limp along for another month then that's going above and beyond. If I say "We need a new backend because ours was written by someone who hasn't worked here in 5 years and it takes us 4 hours to deploy" then everyone wonders what's wrong with me and why can't I just make it work. And If I say I added some shims and interfaces to allow us to gradually change it instead of replacing it wholesale, that's wasting time.

ryanmercer 7y ago
I really, really, really wish I'd got a degree in my late teens/early 20's. I unloaded 100 bitcoin for some WoW gold one time but if I had a time machine for one use I'd go back and tell me at 18 to get a degree and not even mention the crypto, I'd have had a better life. Highschool -> GED > switched from part time to full time retail [1] -> grave digger/grounds keeper [2] -> full time retail [3] -> contractor for CBP [4] -> current job [5]. [1] Best Buy was ok. We were the product processing team so we had to throw the trucks, stock everything, reset the planograms, load heavy stuff, get stuff down stored up top etc. There were 4 of us, there were supposed to be 9 of us so we had to bust ass and it got pretty tiring. [2] Minimum wage was 6$ and change, I was making 10! Outside 50-60 hours a day with no shade, got sun poisoning, had to bury a high school kid, had to bury an infant, would regularly sit in freshly dug graves just to cool down and get out of the sun for a few minutes and climb out before my boss would notice, if I had a fresh grave I'd usually eat my lunch in it too for the same reasons. Showed up at work one day working my way towards sun poisoning again and parked my truck. Sat there for a minute, put it in reverse and left and called the office guy and said sorry man I'm not coming back. [3] I honestly loved everything at Lowes but the pay and the random hours. There was a guy that had a full time job, he only wanted to close. I didn't mind opening and would have been fine with opening and throwing the truck for the departments (hardware, always had to help tools because old guys). So what did they do? "Hey Larry we need you to open, Ryan you're closing"... blinks [4] Got paid a fraction of what the federal employees did, took over the desk of a woman who had retired and apparently had stopped doing anything more than a year before and left a mess, was given zero training on SAP or what I was supposed to be doing and was given a single sheet of paper with some photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy of some screenshots showing me vaguely what to do, the CPA was never in the office if it was nice out as he'd clock in and go play golf, the manager would come in and turn her light on, close the blinds on her window and either leave or just not answer her phone/door, guy across from my cubicle would come over to talk and sit in my extra chair and fall asleep every single day but he did manage to help me sorta figure out what I was supposed to be doing, DHS and other federal and state agencies were in the news for mismanaging funds and doing stuff like buying 2k$ bullet proof vests for dogs in Podunk, Middleamerica population 19 so put in a 30 day notice figuring I'd find a job quick. [5] 13 weeks after my last week at CBP got hired by FTN, been here for 13 3/4 years. Same position I hired in to, although now on my 3rd job title as they change it every few years company-wide. Don't have a degree, only a GED, FedEx wants 4-year degrees minimum for everything. Been here twice as long as all 3 of my team leads, yes I have three team leads. The 3 people on my team immediately higher than me have been here 1/5-1/3 as long as me. 3rd shift makes 15% more than us so new hires start almost at what I make. If you want to move up you need a degree and if you want to be a manager (4 steps above me) you have to be willing to move to another state for (likely) years like my current manager (my 4th manager to date) had to. We share desks with another shift, I had one former desk mate management had to throw the entire contents of their drawer away and some of my stuff because they wore the same shirt every single day at work and kept it in their drawer between shifts, for years, and it smelled horrible because they'd go out and walk in the heat and humidity on their lunch and sweat it up. I had another desk mate that would pick and stick boogers on the monitor frame, the tower, underneath the desk, the stapler (we also have the walls covered by the urinals, and in the stalls, in both men's bathrooms from pick and stickers). Every year at best I can manage about 3% merit increase, I don't think I've ever actually got 3%. They just nuked our pensions to up 401k match, I already can't afford to contribute enough to get the match they had before let alone the new match. Insurance usually goes up more than my merit increase, 2019 I made 2k$ and change less than 2018 thanks to zero over time available. They said they were going to bring a bunch more jobs here so more room for advancement, instead they opened 2 satellite offices in other states. There are now people in those office that have been here 6-12 months that are now higher than me because they had to quick promote them. Realistically I will have to work here until I die as this job doesn't translate to anything else and I'm about to turn 35 without a degree. If I tried to get a degree I'd be 42ish probably and probably fail a few classes before I got used to school after being absent from it for half of my life. I'd then be 42ish going for entry level work with 40-60k$ in debt. I'd probably pay it off by 55ish, meaning I'd have 5-15 years to try and make up on 30-40 years of missed retirement contributions. If I don't die before then, cancer killed my father in his 40's and his mother in her 50's, my mother had cancer in her late 50's. Hate my job, completely dead end yet know I'm stuck here dealing with more and more absurdity until I die. Fun times.

artsyca 7y ago

The first thing we talk about is the clothing we wear to work, that is poignant A lot of tech workers would classify themselves as neither white nor blue-collar because they wear t-shirts thus eschewing the whole conversation whereas technically they'd probably fall into the whitecollar category during any other phase of human history That in itself is the greatest cause of grief in this field the sore lack of common professional manners ethics and customs that causes a total breakdown of communication and culture

theFeller00 7y ago
tech workers are about as close of an equal mix between white and blue as you get. it is modern assembly line trash
BossingAround 7y ago
> That in itself is the greatest cause of grief in this field the sore lack of common professional manners ethics and customs that causes a total breakdown of communication and culture Are you suggesting tech workers, e.g. your average programmer, is unhappy because he or she lacks customs and ethics, which breaks down communication with the outside world?
- deleted 7y ago
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- artsyca 7y ago
  If there even is a she within a fifty metre radius yes I'm telling you that so called tech workers aka code monkeys have graduated straight from the dorm to the open office and have no clue about anything that happened prior to the invention of the soy latte much less how to function in the real world of adult professionalism
  - sfgjhsjkghf 7y ago
    I agree with much of your observations about the degradation of civilization, but your understanding is flawed. Going back to some caricature of the Victorian area, where everyone is forced by rigid constraints into the same cookie cutter mold, isn't the solution to society's problems, it's the cause of it. You posted this comment some time ago: > "I've been in the industry for a long while now long enough to be past the stage of proving myself and looking more towards creating something of lasting value for the world and society and even my own legacy. > "Everyone around me from management to the HR apparatus and even my peers seem geared towards me remaining a non client facing worker bot content with my perks and not harboring any ambitions beyond 'solving challenging problems' as a means to elicit that dopamine rush towards the collective ego > "Growing up I chose computer science because it wasn't supposed to feel like work it was supposed to be a calling a duty but now the whole system is geared towards blind compliance and disengagement > "My good people, how can I break the endless cycle of mindless mechanical labour that has become the software business and become the consummate professional I've always wanted to be?" That's a very good question! The question is, what do you think "professionalism" is, exactly? Everyone being forced into bondage-and-discipline compliance? Like the Schutzstaffel officers who patrol this site to quickly and effectively suppress opinions contrary to the group-think, via vigorous use of the ban hammer, resulting in people continually making throwaway accounts and even pushing them from honest commentary toward purposeful trolling, due to their incessantly growing contempt of a society that oppresses their thoughts and opinions and ideas about living? More oppression, more forced compliance to somebody's arbitrary 1950s ideals, is that the answer to solving all of this chaos, you think?

mapcars 7y ago

>people at white collar jobs are generally happier than people at blue collar jobs Happiness is only found within, all attempts to connect it to outside events or things will inevitably fail.

edelans 7y ago
http://i.imgur.com/kmicO6l.png http://i.imgur.com/kmicO6l.png

theFeller00 7y ago

I fucking hate programming. I would rather go back to labor jobs if the pay was the same. I would rather go back to fast food if it paid the same. I would rather go back to retail if it paid the same.

Diederich 7y ago

I'd love to hear more about what kinds of things you made and maintained.

logicalmind 7y ago

There always seems to be some romanticism of blue collar work from white collar, and vice versa. There is a thread of truth to the things each side says, but there is also a reality that is ignored. I'm from a blue collar family in a blue collar area and have known people from various blue collar professions. Risk and physical atrophy is very real for blue collar workers. In most trades you will work with equipment that can kill, injure and maim you. Even if you avoid the equipment (and your co-workers using the equipment in your vicinity), the physical toll of daily blue collar work is going to impact your body. Most blue collar workers I know have significant physical ailments which start in their 40's or 50's. Bad knees making it difficult to walk. Bad back making your life difficult in all kinds of ways. If you're lucky, you only end up with arthritic hands, making them useless and painful in old age. White collar work is filled with its own issues like sedentary lifestyle, sitting all day, eye strain, etc. But there is almost a zero percent chance if you getting killed or maimed by your equipment. You could definitely take pride in operating and maintaining large expensive machines, but you also face the reality of those machines removing your fingers, limbs, or taking your life. In blue collar work there is big heavy equipment, fumes/gas, extreme heat/cold, etc. I spent my teens and early 20's doing blue collar work (had no plans to go to college), until watching the people around me struggle physically in their 30's made me re-think that decision. Even in the limited time I spent in the trades, I still have lasting scars and injuries from things that happened to me. My scars from white collar work have only been emotional ones. I'm not belittling that, just pointing out that the grass isn't greener.

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