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> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was the only person who would say hello to the cleaning lady as she meekly made her rounds arou

• Flow 5y ago
  I once read a AskReddit about people who worked for extremely rich people. Many said that the old man and wife, who built the fortune, were nice humble people that understood that they are so lucky to have made it in life. Many comments also said that their children were absolute spoiled brats who were the exact opposite to humble.
• magicalhippo 5y ago
  I'm definitely not poor, and I've always greeted the cleaning staff. That's not a sign of being poor, it's a sign of not being an ass.
  • halfdan 5y ago
    The startup I worked for had Spanish speaking cleaning staff. I even brushed up my Spanish to greet them - the smiles on their faces are with me to this day. It wasn't what I was going for but I'm happy that it had this effect.
  • acdha 5y ago
    There’s a strong correlation, however, which I think comes down to whether you have either done or know someone in that kind of job. People who ignore the staff may not be intentionally mean about it - it’s just outside of their normal frame of reference and they haven’t been introspective about that.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Shitty behaviour can be out of ignorance or carelessness, but for follks on the other side of it, thats not much better
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    We have cleaning during work hours, so the idea that someone wouldn't talk to the cleaning staff is absurd to me. Why wouldn't I talk to someone who moves around the office for most of the day.
  • chefandy 5y ago
    Socially dominant cultures' mistreatment of others is always more visible to the others. You're one data point. People on the other side of the divide have many more data points from which to judge. I worked in an Ivy League university while poor— and continued doing so for quite some time. I assure you that treating people in lower socioeconomic classes either as invisible or a mildly concerning presence, depending on the context, and coming from a wealthy, white background is closely correlated. Many of the wealthier students, faculty, and professional staff treated the cleaners, landscapers, catering staff and cafeteria workers like furniture. Of course, there were exceptions. I saw a similar juxtaposition in tech, though the ratio of wealthy to non-wealthy wasn't as extreme as it was in an elite university.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    There's another side of this which is that you and the janitor have very little common ground so while you can say hi to each other anything beyond the most basic small-talk is going to get very uncomfortable for both parties very fast. I'm not going to post my credentials on HN but I have it on good authority that these jobs suck enough without having to pretend to relate to your customer. Hello is fine but beyond that and the janitor probably has their shields up lest they say something stupid the same way a white collar professional would be very careful talking to Bill Gates.
    • Haruiko 5y ago
      I'm not following your argument. You share the same space. How distant are you with other people that you can't just say hi? Does it matter if you don't discuss politics after it? When i was a kid, i had to take the bus and i forgot my bus ticket (a pupil, on one bus stop, everyday, the same bus stop the same bus driver on a school route...) and he put a lot of energy into telling me off. A few days/weeks later i thought about it and i also thought about why i'm not greeting my bus driver when i enter. I started to say hi. I liked it. I liked saying hi to my bus driver. I forgot my bus ticket again. No issues no worries. there was mutual respect and that mutual respect came to acknowleding him. I like greeting my neigbhours as well. Somehow it makes a small connection between us. and yes i read the part with the shield: The first step is a hi. Every other step is easier not harder. Finding out their names, a little bit of talking about family and friends etc. If i would have worked close enough to Bill Gates i probably would have talked to him sooner or later. Why not? He is a human, not like Mark Zuckerburg.
      • kyawzazaw 5y ago
        I say hi only and came from a fairly well-off family. Every additional complaints about my life or happenings in my life that I would have would be unrelatable to the maids and the drivers at our house and it might make them feel uncomfortable.
        • Haruiko 5y ago
          And have you thought about finding out who your maids and drivers are? Talking to them about their lives? No interest in learning who they are? What they like? When they have birthday? If you have a bad day, for whatever reason, you think they couldn't relate to having a bad day?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • fatnoah 5y ago
    >That's not a sign of being poor, it's a sign of not being an ass. Seriously, why wouldn't you talk to the janitor or anyone else? They're the reason you have a clean place to work. I never got the "nothing in common" routine either. They're people, with lives and families and wants and needs. Yeah, they're not spending their day banging their heads against their desks solving reference counting bugs, but they're working to support their lives as best they can.
• subpixel 5y ago
  Oh ignoring the cleaning staff is utter kindness compared to what WeWork did: costumed them in outfits featuring slogans like “Do what you love” etc. while refusing them $10/hr pay.
  • sidlls 5y ago
    Modern livery: belittling and dehumanizing.
• tyrex2017 5y ago
  i found that one weird in my experience, there is no difference in how poor or rich people behave towards low-level staff. in general, my feeling is the rich are more friendly, but it may be less genuine
  • 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
    I only got into tech a bit over five years ago and that was the first time in my entire life I had been above the (demonically low) US poverty level. There is absolutely a difference in how rich and poor people treat poor service workers. It's not that poor people treat them better per se but it's different. Poor people can be cruel to each other because they are all suffering, crab in a bucket shit. Rich people mostly ignore poor people because visible poverty makes them uncomfortable so they look away. They hate themselves if they see our humanity so they try not to. I've been on both sides of this and am speaking from painful experience in both cases.
    • pracer 5y ago
      "Rich people mostly ignore poor people because visible poverty makes them uncomfortable so they look away. They hate themselves if they see our humanity so they try not to." It has to be amazing having such a simple world model. Or better yet, being able to know the deepest ideas and thoughts in other people's minds and to explain their behaviour. Going back to seriousness, and leaving sit-com cliches aside, do you have any solid evidence about this? and when you say rich, could you give a ballpark of the money they have to have to be considered rich? Because poor people in US would have better living conditions than in other countries in Europe, for example.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
        No I'm not getting into this. I've done this so, so many times and there's no value for anyone. You, or someone else, will move the goalposts, or find some hyper specific counterexample and claim it disproves the entire thing. Or claim that the poor aren't poor enough, or someone else somewhere has it worse so their misery can't be real. It's based on my experiences and there's no bibliography for my life. I explained the experiences and why I think they're relevant. If it doesn't work for you then it doesn't. From experience in similar conversations I expect this to be taken as a refusal to argue in good faith. The thing is though I don't want to argue. I said what I said and I stand by it. I have nothing to add.
• jasode 5y ago
  >What kind of society is this that Google is building? Aren't you even allowed to acknowledge someone else's humanity? The social interaction dynamics that happens at the Google building is a reflection of society at large. As another example, I've worked at the offices of charity institutions where the higher level white collar workers ignore the cleaning people. The common theme is that humans in general (and not Google employees specifically) like to stratify people. I recently flipped through a high school yearbook (these books were more popular before the era of Facebook) and noticed that the cafeteria ladies were relegated to a tiny group photo. However, the teachers got individual portraits. So a public institution funded by taxpayer money implicitly stratified 2 different types of workers. Each page of printing a hardcopy yearbook costs money and the food workers are not the same value to the yearbook staff. See the common pattern across humanity?
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    I would say that having individual pictures of teachers make sense as those are the people students have most personal contact with. Now the other administrative staff and cafeteria ladies should be at same level.
    • Viker 5y ago
      Well yes. That is exactly as society. We ignore the people that actually feed us (farmers), and instead we focus all our energy on the people that feed us bullshit (Elon M.).
• fnord77 5y ago
  I don't think that's rich vs. poor. I think that's sociopath vs. non-sociopath. Maybe she was the only non-sociopath at her company?
  • NoGravitas 5y ago
    The two are highly correlated.
• trabant00 5y ago
  That got my attention as well, but instead it made me think that maybe the author exaggerated a bit here and there.
• kungito 5y ago
  Not saying hello is a bit extreme but I feel like often IT people just refrain from initiating conversation with people unrelated to their interests/work
• giantg2 5y ago
  Some of it is situational though. I only sometimes say hello. I also worked as a janitor before and have no problem with people not saying hello. The bigger issue is if they are ignoring you and messing up your work (getting in the way, ignoring you when you need to get their trashcan from their desk, being an excessive slob like I'm here to clean but you don't have to make my job harder just because you don't have to clean it up yourself).
• TrackerFF 5y ago
  As Homer said almost 3000 years ago, god likes to pair like with like.
• kubb 5y ago
  This might be a learned defence mechanism against a general feeling of wearines with the state of the world. You might work a (relatively) well-paying job at a megacorp, but often you're confronted with colleagues that get promotions through what seems like bullshit projects, you see how useless your directors or even execs seem to be and how much cash they pocket, and you're forced to do some sham work yourself, maybe because whoever is leading your team wants to advance their career. So your everyday work experience is crap, and you have no agency over anything, and you feel miserable. Then you see the cleaning staff, and you're confronted with their reality, the fact that they have to do work that is both harder and potentially more useful than what you're doing but they don't get any of the benefits, and they get paid a fraction of what you do, and that just makes you feel even worse, like this entire system is somehow fundamentally broken, which makes you want to trow your ergonomic chair out of the unopenable glass window of your open space. So it's easier to just look away.
  • krysp 5y ago
    This is probably a large part of it. The higher up the chain you go the more obvious it is - the system, the game, whatever you want to call it. Finally understanding what it means to sell your soul, and seeing that at least the janitor kept most of theirs.
  • namelessoracle 5y ago
    I am shocked that more people dont acknowledge that the more you get paid the less "hard" the work you do is. Like there's an entire well known meme about rest and vest at Google. (Amazon and Netflix will bounce you though if rumors are true) It's been true my entire life that every bracket of pay raise increase i've gotten has had a commensurate decrease in the amount of physical labor and mental exhaustion i would suffer. Going from minimum wage to 30k+ was a breath of fresh air. Going pass 100k was realizing you were living in a coal mine where everyone smoked and the 30k just meant you got to take clean air breaks every now and then. Of course then you have the attendant desperation in the US of "falling down" back to the level you were before and knowing the life style you live now can not possibly be sustained in those positions. A simple mental exercise. When was the last time you had to ask permission to use the restroom at your place of employment? One serious issue i've seen with alot of tech workers is that they have NO IDEA whats it's like to ever work minimum wage. They went from middle class existence to college to a tech job making more money than most people ever will. The minimum wage worker and even middle wage worker existence is invisible and nonsensical to them.
• TulliusCicero 5y ago
  > I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all. I worked at HQ as an engineer, and didn't notice any such thing. Most of the time I probably didn't say hi to cleaning staff, for the same reason I wouldn't say hi to most of the people I pass by in the office: because they weren't someone I knew. Of course this might vary depending on context, but I was treating them the same way I treated everyone else, or at least trying to. Do other people say hi to every single person you see in the building every day?
  • grayclhn 5y ago
    > Do other people say hi to every single person you see in the building every day? Yeah, pretty much.
    • jpseawell 5y ago
      Lol, idk if that’s true? I’ve been poor working with poor people and we did not all say hello on a regular basis
      • avh02 5y ago
        one thing that stood out to me when i was in Southampton in the UK was that every passenger on the bus would say some form of "thank you" on their way off the bus. So, sometimes, yeah.
      • Haruiko 5y ago
        I'm doing it, always have. A lot of other colleuges never do it. I would argue that this has just nothing to do with poor/rich or where you work. Perhaps its just random how your work environment or your collegues are.
    • fatnoah 5y ago
      >Yeah, pretty much. I generally say hi to everyone as well, especially if I've made eye contact. At the very least, some kind of acknowledgement.
    • 5y ago
• UncleMeat 5y ago
  > I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all. Googler for many years here. I've never heard of this kind of thing. One of the most prolific and loved content creators on the internal meme board is in sales. The closest thing I've ever heard like this in the entire valley is that at Apple they don't pay for the lunch bill of non-engineers, so having premium lunch options can feel exclusive to engineers. One of the most widely praised decisions Google made during the pandemic was to continue to pay their vendor staff who maintain the buildings even though there was no work to be done. And they kept that promise (as far as I can tell) for the entire process even though the initial expectation was that WFH would last for a few months. My personal experience at Google has been that people do chat with vendor staff like custodial workers and kitchen staff.
  • rkk3 5y ago
    How about earlier this month when corporate asked child care workers to come back to the office to take care of your kids and refused to re instate their transportation benefits? https://thehill.com/policy/technology/552403-google-childcare-workers-petition-for-transportation-stipend https://thehill.com/policy/technology/552403-google-childcar...
  • xenadu02 5y ago
    Apple's campus cafeteria is not a free perk for anyone, including engineers.
    • UncleMeat 5y ago
      Last time I was there (which was admittedly like six years ago) the person I was visiting said they got some stipend to be used at the cafeteria. Entirely possible I've misremembered.
  • webmaven 5y ago
    > > I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all. > Googler for many years here. I've never heard of this kind of thing. Not a Googler myself, but from what I heard the divide isn't between engineering and non-engineering roles, but between Google employees and contractors (and that you can tell who is which by their badges).
• Aunche 5y ago
  For me, and I suspect many others in tech, this has more to do with introversion than anything else. When I cleaned for a cafe, I just wanted to focus on my task on hand.
• throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  There's probably a handful of other people who would say hello to the cleaning lady but don't feel comfortable doing it because they're in the same position as the author but realized nobody says hello to the cleaning lady and decided they'll just do what everyone else is doing in order to fit in.
• fighterpilot 5y ago
  This is the status quo at almost every company.
• darren_ 5y ago
  > I've heard stories that at Google, the non-engineering workers at campus may not socialize with engineers at all. What kind of society is this that Google is building? This isn't true at all.
• sanderjd 5y ago
  This isn't close to being true at all in my experience.
• novok 5y ago
  To be fair, large tech companies have a lot of people, most people don't talk to most people in tech companies, even if they are the same 'position'. Much like you don't talk to most random students as you walk around at large university as a student at the university. You talk to your classmates and professors and if circumstance permits, you talk to random stranger students sometimes.