>>> less likely to work in a job that puts them at physical risk.
During lockdown panic I was 'critical infrastructure' fixing heavy equipment. Nothing slowed down for me, risks were same working on broken machines (or greater depending on your view of virus risk) and the laptop crowd got to 'stay safe' at home while others got pandemic pay to sit at home.
Many dangerous jobs get little acknowledgment. These people literally keep the gears of society turning, and are often derided as being dumb with dirty fingernails.
I just spent time driving through the gulf coast and came to a similar conclusion. Have you all seen Mobile, for example? Oil rigs as far as the eyes can see. Stopped by the gas station to see these poor, filthy men counting change to buy tea and cigarettes.
It made me really think...these people work way, way harder than me on something way more important to society (right now). Why are they so mistreated? Why do whole cities , usually poor, have to deal with the eyesore and potential health issues of oil and gas? And why do oil companies, who are unmistakably the richest in the world, pay less than tech companies who lose money each year?
It just feels like some weird, giant imbalance. If you asked me today whether I'd rather go without Twitter, FB, and Netflix...or gas and plastics, sorry, you lose Silicon Valley.
I don't have any answers or even suggestions, just thoughts and questions for now.
> these people work way, way harder than me on something way more important to society (right now). Why are they so mistreated?
Just an aside, but oil & gas jobs are generally quite well paid, including the filthy ones. But maybe not all. The reason why very important jobs can be very low paid is no great mystery: it’s because the labor market is based on supply and demand, not importance.
How hard people work has never and should never affect how much they are paid. That isn't a factor in supply and demand except to the extent that people will be more hesitant to take hard jobs.
Successful wolves gain control over quite a lot of territory and rule it ruthlessly. Since land has value to all living things, and wolves control land, they are actually quite wealthy.
I've done everything from digging ditches, to being a mechanic, to corpse/biohazard cleanup, along with literally around 70 other manual labor jobs. Before finally after getting my back hurt and laid up for a year I spent that time learning Linux and system administration and on to programming eventually becoming systems administrator and as the job continued to change and evolve (though really the main difference is it's not a hair ball of PERL anymore) senior devops engineer, ended up as a team lead leading a team of devops engineers, moved on to owning my own succesful consulting agency providing devops ci-cd pipeline design implementation and maintenance. So you could say I'm part of the "laptop crowd".
My dad was a heavy equipment mechnanic in El-Paso repairing the hydraulics on earth movers and everything else any of the big equipment needed.
I appreciate that hard work as only someone who has done it can do, but the angst over supposed derision reminds me of the rhetoric that comes from that think tank owned, walking, talking piece of propaganda Mike Rowe (such a shame I liked his show). No one is deriding anyone. If you want the truth, most coders, and system admins love anyone who can work with their hands and spend a bunch of time on projects of their own, getting grease under their fingernails, or wood shaving in their beard, or welding sparks in their hair. Most of them day dream of a job where they make things they can hold in their hands. I still restore and build period correct choppers and hot rods, my friends in the industry weld, or blow glass, or work with wood. Working with our hands is a way to get away from computer work.
The truth is people in tech just don't think about these jobs because they haven't come in contact with the people working them.
With that said, the dumb and dirty finger nailed trope didn't leap into existence out of thin air, you may not like to hear this but, a hell of a lot of people working those jobs ARE dumb as hell and would work any other kind of job if they could learn how to do so. I worked with them, and many could not do anything else. Being able to hang parts, or being clever about aspects of their trade does not mean someone is smart, or knowledgeable it means they are good at what they do for 40 to 60 hours a week. Racism, addiction to stupid vices like dip, violence at home to their wife or children, DUIs, were common at practically every place I worked, and I would get shit for reading during my lunch breaks. If I had known I could use my ability to research, remember, and learn complex ideas to get out of doing manual labor sooner I would have, and I would probably still have functioning l3, and l4, discs.
Conversely there are plenty of smart and driven men who just can't stomach being cooped up inside all day, in my experience they ended up running their own work crews as a general contractor, or becoming a foreman, or like yourself drifting to the technical end of things, working on complex equipment that requires problem solving skills rather than just hanging parts. Either way I guess the point of my reply was to try to let you know you probably have the wrong idea about the laptop crowd in exactly the same way some of them have it wrong about people who work with their hands.
Apologies for any grammar or spelling mistakes, while I can do anything computer related, I started working at 15 as a roofer and never returned to formal schooling, so writing well is a weakness of mine.
Thanks. I was born in a completely blue collar family (first to go to university) and my father was the first one to congratulate me on not having to do what he does for exactly the same reason you wrote.
Perfectly well written, and more importantly to me, insightful and interesting. Seems obvious once you said it, but I think we forget not everybody is like us sometimes.
During lockdown panic I was 'critical infrastructure' fixing heavy equipment. Nothing slowed down for me, risks were same working on broken machines (or greater depending on your view of virus risk) and the laptop crowd got to 'stay safe' at home while others got pandemic pay to sit at home.
Many dangerous jobs get little acknowledgment. These people literally keep the gears of society turning, and are often derided as being dumb with dirty fingernails.