>> "I'd finished college, got my degree and had a highly paid job in social work" >Is that the famous British humor, or do they actually get paid pretty well o

>> "I'd finished college, got my degree and had a highly paid job in social work" >Is that the famous British humor, or do they actually get paid pretty well on that side of the pond? Depends on your perspective. I suspect a social worker's salary in the mid '80s looked pretty good from the perspective of somebody who grew up in a UK mining town (the failed '80s miners' strike and mass redundancies brought some pretty horrible poverty). Social workers are not well paid compared to people who do important work such as frontend web development[1]. Sometimes their managers do pretty well (probably not compared to what they could make in the private sector). In the context of HN I think pretty much everybody is unimaginably poor. [1] That was the famous British humour