5 ms·

When you do office work you get the "you're not really working" When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder" We never win, and sometimes acc

When you do office work you get the "you're not really working" When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder" We never win, and sometimes accepting that is the right decision. To not be loved is a simple mistake, to not love one another is a fatal mistake.

ozim 2y ago
Issue is “you should have learned harder” is always from office workers. Conversely “you’re not really working” comes from blue collar workers. Both sentences are the same and they are usually used by assholes from one or the other side that either feel attacked or feel superior. There is no intrinsic value in any of those statements besides what it is saying about person using it - that person is an asshole.
- amaurose 2y ago
  I dont think it is as simple as that. Throwing everyone into the a-hole pool is a rather simplistic approach, and a very dismissive one at that. In particular, the first sentence is often a reply to someone lamenting their situation, while the second sentence is often a statement ment to insult upwards. Context is important.
  - bumby 2y ago
    Maybe not assholes, but it is a pretty blatant status play. By denigrating someone else’s work you raise yourself up by comparison. And while a lot of our psychological health is tied to our relative status in society, that doesn’t make it healthy behavior. Edit: it's also telling from a status standpoint that you characterized the blue collar comment as "insulting upwards." It would probably go a long way to avoiding those types of comments in the first place if people didn't implicitly think blue collar work is "below" white collar work.
  - pc86 2y ago
    Why is one of those better than the other?
    - ozim 2y ago
      Seems like amaurose would feel OK with dropping it on someone who is nagging about his current life circumstances while they could learn more. Even if it is technically true - why would anyone actually say that to someone?
- jumping_frog 2y ago
  What do finance guys think about the other two? They are just moving numbers up and down. Have finance guys ever built anything brick by brick (digital bricks or physical bricks) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9_oWUI7Vo_M https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9_oWUI7Vo_M
0xEF 2y ago
Wisdom, right here. My position has one foot in the engineering department and one on the factory floor. The engineers think the factory workers are all troglodytes that just have to push buttons, and the factory workers think the engineers don't do anything but sit in front of the computer. Oddly, both believe the other does not have to think because the machine/computer does all the thinking for them, which is so far from the truth. It all seems to grow from a Seed of Ignorance:; a complete lack of understanding of what someone else's job actually entails, coupled with the subjective measure of how difficult a thing is which is largely based on our own narrow limitations and experiences. It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector.
- diggan 2y ago
  > It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector. In my experience, it seems to apply to every sector out there. I got started in a different industry than what I'm active in now, and what you describe I have seen across any type of job I've held.
- jumping_frog 2y ago
  Then there are Excel collar workers who decide what gets build in the first place or what needs to be downsized. People in private equity decide which resource is worthy of keeping or which needs to be let go.
- kxrm 2y ago
  I wonder if there would be any benefit to allowing each to take a peek into the other's world? I am not sure how it could be done, but some way to allow them to try on the other's role for a day so they can see a full picture of what their co-workers do.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - TuringTourist 2y ago
atoav 2y ago
You can't please everyone — and even more important: Some people just love to complain for the sake of it. I suspect they put themselves above others that way. "Shit I could sit in that warm office" becomes "You are lazy" or else they have to question their life choices. Vice versa "Shit I could do something less boring" becomes "But I have learned more" for similar reasons. Grass is always greener.. My experience as someone who needs to do both is that often "game recognizes game", so great office workers will appreciate great blue collar workers and vice versa — if given the chance. Every blue collar worker had situations where they had to wait because some lazy office bum that had to give them paperwork would rather chat with their collegues than do their job. And every white collar worker had situation where a craftsperson communicated in single word fragments, went off and was seen to smoke cigarettes for half the time only to write them down as work hours while leaving things broken afterwards. The only thing capable blue/white collar workers hate more than that is uncapable people on their own side.
devjab 2y ago
I don’t think people saying these things are inherently wrong. “Not working” is obviously wrong because using brain is work, and it’s exhausting work in many cases. The flip-side, and this is probably what is meant, is that you don’t break your body doing it. Similarly it’s obviously silly to think a higher education is necessary for a good working life. A lot of independent contractors and trades people have some really cool jobs that most office workers would be jealous of. Again what is meant is the perception that not having a higher education leads to a poorer life, which it can, but doesn’t have to. I think that especially calling white collars out as not doing real work is often lovingly. It can be said by assholes, but the language around physical labour is often “tough love”. I’m not sure calling blue collar workers unfulfilled is very often lovingly though, so I think most people who do that are assholes. What is interesting in the debate to me, is that I see a lot of IT work as blue collar work. Not all of it, but a lot of what we do is basically trade-skill related similar to how plumbing is. It’s just no physical. Over all though, I think it’s best to spend very little time on people who actually mean it hatefully when they call you X. Who cares what assholes think?
- michaelt 2y ago
  > What is interesting in the debate to me, is that I see a lot of IT work as blue collar work. Society has loads of edge cases like this. I broke my arm a few years back, went to hospital, and a surgeon put some titanium plates and screws in. The orthopaedic surgeon spends a lot of the day standing, they repeat similar work every day with minor variations, they can't work remotely, they're exposed to hazardous chemicals, they have face-to-face interactions with customers, they earn money by working rather than from investments or inheritance, they're union members, they get paid overtime, they wear blue employer-issued workwear, many do shift work, and they literally put in screws for a living. And yet nobody would say surgeons are blue collar workers. Maybe because of the $500k salaries, or the air-conditioned hospitals they work in, or because their status is equivalent to doctors who are pretty much the definition of upper-middle-class tie-wearing knowledge workers.
  - sarchertech 2y ago
    > they're union members, they get paid overtime Very few surgeons are union members. They frequently work for outside groups and are paid per procedure. The ones that do work for the hospital on salary don’t get overtime. >status is equivalent to doctors They are doctors. Both in title and in function. Most surgeons only operate a couple days a week. The rest of their time they see patients in clinic, and an outside observer couldn’t tell the difference between their work environment and a primary care physician’s. You are onto something though. My wife is an ER doctor and her job is very similar to blue collar service jobs (if you consider service jobs blue collar). She doesn’t make her own schedule. She works insane shifts (one day she could work 7a-4p, the next 10p-7a). She interacts with patients directly all day. The pay is a lot better, but the hours are worse than any retail job I’ve ever heard of, and you can’t call in sick. Her coworker was sick and could barely get out of bed, but she came in early to have a nurse give her an IV so she could power through her shift—that kind of thing is very common. Plus you have the ultimate responsibility for every patient that comes through the door. You have to make sure you don’t miss anything serious every time—while at the same time, making sure that you don’t spend too much time with each patient. And the ER you’re working in is full because the floor is too full to admit new patients but the ER can’t just shut the door, so patients are boarding in the halls. Oh and if you mess up, you can literally lose your house when a jury awards someone more than your malpractice insurance will cover.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
analog31 2y ago
Do people really think like that? I don't. I'd be ill-suited to most office jobs and most blue-collar jobs. I tend to think "you should have better labor laws, workplace safety, safety net, health care, education..."
Roark66 2y ago
Yeah, add to that the famous Elon Musk's troll quote, "working from home is unethical, because other people can't all work from home - think about all the people growing your food etc". Yeah, Am I also supposed to feel bad because I work normal working hours and others work at night? What about the people that have to lift heavy objects all day and do back breaking labour, and I "sit or stand at my desk all day". How about those that have a 3h commute while I walked to work from my city center apartment (back when I did work on site). People will always find something to beat you over the head with. The most important thing is not to let them infect you with their negativity.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  The humanitarian tone of your comment clashes nicely with your AynRandish username. ;-)
- randomdata 2y ago
  > think about all the people growing your food etc Did he really say that? Farmers are the original WFH-ers.
- amaurose 2y ago
  Humility doesn't hurt anyone.
HPsquared 2y ago
When you are self-employed it's "you couldn't handle a real job"
Aunche 2y ago
"Lot's of people have tough lives, and things like minimum wage can help these people," is something I can potentially get behind. "You're a privileged sitter. Your kind control society yet refuse minimum wage increases, demonstrating a lack of empathy" just alienates me. I struggle to understand this the benefit of this framing outside of in-group virtue signalling.
- diggan 2y ago
  Frustrated people use frustrated language, sometimes we have to be able to see past that. As someone who used to live below minimum wage, but haven't in a long time, I guess it's easier for me to understand why people get frustrated enough to use emotional language, as it's (seemingly or actually) affecting their daily life at every turn, and they see others around them get richer and richer. Ironically enough, that you cannot see past the emotional language and describe the quote as "alienating me" also demonstrate an lack of empathy for me, but I guess that's beyond the topic.
  - wang_li 2y ago
    The use of "frustrated" language demonstrates no self reflection and recognition of the fact that why someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves and they have a large amount of envy about other people's lives. The takers love to ignore the past and only look at this instant moment and complain about how unfair it is. Ironically, the people who say "you're selfish and greedy if you don't give me the money you earned" and "you have no empathy" have no empathy or consideration for the people they want to take from.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      > ...why someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves and they have a large amount of envy about other people's lives. The takers... Tell us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase withnout telling us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase.
    - 2y ago
jerf 2y ago
If you define "win" as "everyone likes and agrees with me", it is true you will never "win". I would suggest putting in the time to find a different definition of "win" for your life, rather than accepting it.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
> When you do office work you get the "you're not really working" > When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder" Do you really though? I know there's a lingering sentiment from somewhere, but at the same time... I don't recognise this sentiment at all, neither from personal experience nor anecdotal from diverse / random people on the internet in 2024.
- shortstuffsushi 2y ago
  In my own experience, I'm the oldest of five and was very much pushed to go to college in a family where my dad, his brothers, and one of my brothers are carpenters. Another of my brothers is a manual machinist. On this side of things, there is a continuous stream of "I can't imagine sitting at a desk all day and dealing with those sorts of people." (because office people are wimps and having less than a yelling, swearing disagreement is unthinkable) On the other side of things, because I still do a lot of that sort of "trade work" to help out friends since it's my background, I get a lot of "how do you know how to do all this, aren't you glad you went to school and don't have to do this every day, have you tried to convince your family to go back to school?" (and of course, the republicans are bad / dumb undertones, even present in the linked article)
indoordin0saur 2y ago
You could be an engineer doing something physical like construction or mechanical engineering? Advanced degree and high pay but you spend plenty of time doing real tangible stuff. Also, there's obvious stuff like surgeons: highly respected and you're doing physical work.
paulddraper 2y ago
> We never win You never win everything simultaneously, yes.

ozim 2y ago

Issue is “you should have learned harder” is always from office workers. Conversely “you’re not really working” comes from blue collar workers. Both sentences are the same and they are usually used by assholes from one or the other side that either feel attacked or feel superior. There is no intrinsic value in any of those statements besides what it is saying about person using it - that person is an asshole.

amaurose 2y ago
I dont think it is as simple as that. Throwing everyone into the a-hole pool is a rather simplistic approach, and a very dismissive one at that. In particular, the first sentence is often a reply to someone lamenting their situation, while the second sentence is often a statement ment to insult upwards. Context is important.
- bumby 2y ago
  Maybe not assholes, but it is a pretty blatant status play. By denigrating someone else’s work you raise yourself up by comparison. And while a lot of our psychological health is tied to our relative status in society, that doesn’t make it healthy behavior. Edit: it's also telling from a status standpoint that you characterized the blue collar comment as "insulting upwards." It would probably go a long way to avoiding those types of comments in the first place if people didn't implicitly think blue collar work is "below" white collar work.
- pc86 2y ago
  Why is one of those better than the other?
  - ozim 2y ago
    Seems like amaurose would feel OK with dropping it on someone who is nagging about his current life circumstances while they could learn more. Even if it is technically true - why would anyone actually say that to someone?
jumping_frog 2y ago
What do finance guys think about the other two? They are just moving numbers up and down. Have finance guys ever built anything brick by brick (digital bricks or physical bricks) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9_oWUI7Vo_M https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9_oWUI7Vo_M

0xEF 2y ago

Wisdom, right here. My position has one foot in the engineering department and one on the factory floor. The engineers think the factory workers are all troglodytes that just have to push buttons, and the factory workers think the engineers don't do anything but sit in front of the computer. Oddly, both believe the other does not have to think because the machine/computer does all the thinking for them, which is so far from the truth. It all seems to grow from a Seed of Ignorance:; a complete lack of understanding of what someone else's job actually entails, coupled with the subjective measure of how difficult a thing is which is largely based on our own narrow limitations and experiences. It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector.

diggan 2y ago
> It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector. In my experience, it seems to apply to every sector out there. I got started in a different industry than what I'm active in now, and what you describe I have seen across any type of job I've held.
jumping_frog 2y ago
Then there are Excel collar workers who decide what gets build in the first place or what needs to be downsized. People in private equity decide which resource is worthy of keeping or which needs to be let go.
kxrm 2y ago
I wonder if there would be any benefit to allowing each to take a peek into the other's world? I am not sure how it could be done, but some way to allow them to try on the other's role for a day so they can see a full picture of what their co-workers do.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - TuringTourist 2y ago

atoav 2y ago

You can't please everyone — and even more important: Some people just love to complain for the sake of it. I suspect they put themselves above others that way. "Shit I could sit in that warm office" becomes "You are lazy" or else they have to question their life choices. Vice versa "Shit I could do something less boring" becomes "But I have learned more" for similar reasons. Grass is always greener.. My experience as someone who needs to do both is that often "game recognizes game", so great office workers will appreciate great blue collar workers and vice versa — if given the chance. Every blue collar worker had situations where they had to wait because some lazy office bum that had to give them paperwork would rather chat with their collegues than do their job. And every white collar worker had situation where a craftsperson communicated in single word fragments, went off and was seen to smoke cigarettes for half the time only to write them down as work hours while leaving things broken afterwards. The only thing capable blue/white collar workers hate more than that is uncapable people on their own side.

devjab 2y ago

I don’t think people saying these things are inherently wrong. “Not working” is obviously wrong because using brain is work, and it’s exhausting work in many cases. The flip-side, and this is probably what is meant, is that you don’t break your body doing it. Similarly it’s obviously silly to think a higher education is necessary for a good working life. A lot of independent contractors and trades people have some really cool jobs that most office workers would be jealous of. Again what is meant is the perception that not having a higher education leads to a poorer life, which it can, but doesn’t have to. I think that especially calling white collars out as not doing real work is often lovingly. It can be said by assholes, but the language around physical labour is often “tough love”. I’m not sure calling blue collar workers unfulfilled is very often lovingly though, so I think most people who do that are assholes. What is interesting in the debate to me, is that I see a lot of IT work as blue collar work. Not all of it, but a lot of what we do is basically trade-skill related similar to how plumbing is. It’s just no physical. Over all though, I think it’s best to spend very little time on people who actually mean it hatefully when they call you X. Who cares what assholes think?

michaelt 2y ago
> What is interesting in the debate to me, is that I see a lot of IT work as blue collar work. Society has loads of edge cases like this. I broke my arm a few years back, went to hospital, and a surgeon put some titanium plates and screws in. The orthopaedic surgeon spends a lot of the day standing, they repeat similar work every day with minor variations, they can't work remotely, they're exposed to hazardous chemicals, they have face-to-face interactions with customers, they earn money by working rather than from investments or inheritance, they're union members, they get paid overtime, they wear blue employer-issued workwear, many do shift work, and they literally put in screws for a living. And yet nobody would say surgeons are blue collar workers. Maybe because of the $500k salaries, or the air-conditioned hospitals they work in, or because their status is equivalent to doctors who are pretty much the definition of upper-middle-class tie-wearing knowledge workers.
- sarchertech 2y ago
  > they're union members, they get paid overtime Very few surgeons are union members. They frequently work for outside groups and are paid per procedure. The ones that do work for the hospital on salary don’t get overtime. >status is equivalent to doctors They are doctors. Both in title and in function. Most surgeons only operate a couple days a week. The rest of their time they see patients in clinic, and an outside observer couldn’t tell the difference between their work environment and a primary care physician’s. You are onto something though. My wife is an ER doctor and her job is very similar to blue collar service jobs (if you consider service jobs blue collar). She doesn’t make her own schedule. She works insane shifts (one day she could work 7a-4p, the next 10p-7a). She interacts with patients directly all day. The pay is a lot better, but the hours are worse than any retail job I’ve ever heard of, and you can’t call in sick. Her coworker was sick and could barely get out of bed, but she came in early to have a nurse give her an IV so she could power through her shift—that kind of thing is very common. Plus you have the ultimate responsibility for every patient that comes through the door. You have to make sure you don’t miss anything serious every time—while at the same time, making sure that you don’t spend too much time with each patient. And the ER you’re working in is full because the floor is too full to admit new patients but the ER can’t just shut the door, so patients are boarding in the halls. Oh and if you mess up, you can literally lose your house when a jury awards someone more than your malpractice insurance will cover.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

analog31 2y ago

Do people really think like that? I don't. I'd be ill-suited to most office jobs and most blue-collar jobs. I tend to think "you should have better labor laws, workplace safety, safety net, health care, education..."

Roark66 2y ago

Yeah, add to that the famous Elon Musk's troll quote, "working from home is unethical, because other people can't all work from home - think about all the people growing your food etc". Yeah, Am I also supposed to feel bad because I work normal working hours and others work at night? What about the people that have to lift heavy objects all day and do back breaking labour, and I "sit or stand at my desk all day". How about those that have a 3h commute while I walked to work from my city center apartment (back when I did work on site). People will always find something to beat you over the head with. The most important thing is not to let them infect you with their negativity.

CRConrad 2y ago
The humanitarian tone of your comment clashes nicely with your AynRandish username. ;-)
randomdata 2y ago
> think about all the people growing your food etc Did he really say that? Farmers are the original WFH-ers.
amaurose 2y ago
Humility doesn't hurt anyone.

HPsquared 2y ago

When you are self-employed it's "you couldn't handle a real job"

Aunche 2y ago

"Lot's of people have tough lives, and things like minimum wage can help these people," is something I can potentially get behind. "You're a privileged sitter. Your kind control society yet refuse minimum wage increases, demonstrating a lack of empathy" just alienates me. I struggle to understand this the benefit of this framing outside of in-group virtue signalling.

diggan 2y ago
Frustrated people use frustrated language, sometimes we have to be able to see past that. As someone who used to live below minimum wage, but haven't in a long time, I guess it's easier for me to understand why people get frustrated enough to use emotional language, as it's (seemingly or actually) affecting their daily life at every turn, and they see others around them get richer and richer. Ironically enough, that you cannot see past the emotional language and describe the quote as "alienating me" also demonstrate an lack of empathy for me, but I guess that's beyond the topic.
- wang_li 2y ago
  The use of "frustrated" language demonstrates no self reflection and recognition of the fact that why someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves and they have a large amount of envy about other people's lives. The takers love to ignore the past and only look at this instant moment and complain about how unfair it is. Ironically, the people who say "you're selfish and greedy if you don't give me the money you earned" and "you have no empathy" have no empathy or consideration for the people they want to take from.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > ...why someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves and they have a large amount of envy about other people's lives. The takers... Tell us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase withnout telling us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase.
  - 2y ago

jerf 2y ago

If you define "win" as "everyone likes and agrees with me", it is true you will never "win". I would suggest putting in the time to find a different definition of "win" for your life, rather than accepting it.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

> When you do office work you get the "you're not really working" > When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder" Do you really though? I know there's a lingering sentiment from somewhere, but at the same time... I don't recognise this sentiment at all, neither from personal experience nor anecdotal from diverse / random people on the internet in 2024.

shortstuffsushi 2y ago
In my own experience, I'm the oldest of five and was very much pushed to go to college in a family where my dad, his brothers, and one of my brothers are carpenters. Another of my brothers is a manual machinist. On this side of things, there is a continuous stream of "I can't imagine sitting at a desk all day and dealing with those sorts of people." (because office people are wimps and having less than a yelling, swearing disagreement is unthinkable) On the other side of things, because I still do a lot of that sort of "trade work" to help out friends since it's my background, I get a lot of "how do you know how to do all this, aren't you glad you went to school and don't have to do this every day, have you tried to convince your family to go back to school?" (and of course, the republicans are bad / dumb undertones, even present in the linked article)

indoordin0saur 2y ago

You could be an engineer doing something physical like construction or mechanical engineering? Advanced degree and high pay but you spend plenty of time doing real tangible stuff. Also, there's obvious stuff like surgeons: highly respected and you're doing physical work.

paulddraper 2y ago

> We never win You never win everything simultaneously, yes.