This is a case of the contrarian dynamic: an initial wave of objections to the article, followed by a wave of objections to the objections. The latter get upvoted, and so we end up with a top comment saying "I can't believe the comments in this thread" or (as in the current example) "the comments here are so $bad_somehow". Recent explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616. More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

It's important to be aware that this is a mechanical process. The first comments to appear in a thread are there because they're the fastest to write, not because they come from "the average HN commenter". Another way of putting this is that the initial comments tend to be reflexive rather than reflective: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... (Objecting to objections can be reflexive also, but at least the second wave tends to be more substantive and charitable.)

In some ways it's a laundry list of ways rich people in the Bay Area act like wankers, which is interesting, but also quite irritatingly stereotypical. There are plenty who don't refuse to talk to the cleaning staff, lecture others on their choice of tampon, or snob fat people at the gym.

I don't want people from outside the bubble (e.g. me, three years ago) to read this and think they'll be surrounded by wall-to-wall wankery and class prejudice if they take a job at a SF startup, because it's not wholly representative of all employees at all startups. Most of them are nice. Most people everywhere are nice.

Even without the race element - there’s definitely a class thing.

I noticed it when I moved to the Bay Area after growing up in western New York. The types of foods people ate or didn’t eat, the restaurants people would or would not go to.

The shows people would or would not watch, even the way people talked. I think I hadn’t really seen the difference in class behavior before in America. Now it’s easy to see it.

A lot of it is tightly correlated to wealth and a lot of it reminds me of things the author describes (fear of not being able to find a job, fear of just “taking a year off” because it sounds financially crazy), but it’s not only about wealth really.

You can be poor and still act more “upper class” and you can be rich and still act “working class”. It’s a lot of little things people do in preferences and how they talk/behave.

> Many of the comments on this article are so cold.

I mean, the tone of the article is pretty much "me vs them", so is really any surprise that some people would take offense?

The anecdotes range anywhere from caricatures (hot cheetos) to gaffes (cheering over a bonus cheque). What you're implying is that one ought to be empathetic about the OP's struggles w/ "rich person etiquette". But that in itself is a bit tone deaf: it comes across as "first world problems" to those who aren't in the "silicon valley bubble" and it comes across as elitism strawmen to those whose entire careers are in Bay Area tech.

It's kinda like listening to Justin Bieber sing about how lonely he is. It might strictly be true that he struggles w/ loneliness, and it might strictly be true that empathizing with him is "the right thing to do", but it's also strictly true that everyone has a right to not give a rats ass.

The "poor" mindset varies from person to person. Sure there are people that struggle w/ ghetto mindset, but I've had conversations with many people who self-identified as "cheap bastards" (in their own words) who would talk about slowly coming to terms with the fact that they now had decent incomes and disposable money.

Being HN, people love to debate, and god forbid you give an in for moral high-grounding.

My student loans were crushing at one point. Now I require my friends and family to remind me the weight of a 'few thousands'. I feel drawn towards a bubble where I can do opulent activities without guilt. I've heard people say to me "yeah, eventually you just cut off those friends still working at McDonald's". I've never agreed - it takes an arrogant self-realization to agree with such a statement - but I've felt the gradual drift. The article is a good reminder in humility.

Personally, I'm reacting negatively because it feels like she says she does all these things that I do, and that nearly everyone in nearly every office I've worked in does. And she uses it to draw a contrast between herself and us. So to me all but a couple items read as "I knew I was different because I do this thing that nearly everyone does."

Maybe I'm in a weird lucky tech bubble where I've gotten to have a whole career that's mostly devoid of the people she's drawing a contrast against, but I've worked at a pretty disparate variety of jobs, and my experience seems to ring true with a lot of other commenters too.

Maybe I'm just having a kneejerk reaction because the last articles I read this morning were "silicon valley and californians are bad/clueless," and I'm reading that into this when it's not intended subtext.

Some people enjoy having their heartstrings tugged. Others don’t. What causes people to feel sympathy differs from person to person. I remember reading some tweet from Chrissy Teigen before she stopped tweeting complaining about a restaurant serving her a $10,000 bottle of wine without mentioning the price when she asked for something that went well with her dish. Not my kind of problem but it annoyed her. No doubt there are Americans from generational wealth who could write about their discomfort dealing with Brits of similar status in Britain, not knowing all the correct shibboleths. People feel alienated all the time, everywhere. I felt alienated from my classmates all through primary and secondary school. I got to university and found my people. Not fitting in and figuring out how to fit in is a really common experience. Right now there’s some black kid who’s really, really into metal going to his first live gig and he’s feeling awkward because he doesn’t know anyone and when he does he’ll pronounce something wrong or say cool instead of based or something. There’s an American kid at his first day at a school in Britain who’s going to get called a Yank. There’s a leftist kid going to his first demonstration who’s going to get called a TERF. This is a thing that happens.

You're absolutely right. People are not reacting the way you had hoped. They are reacting by questioning the assertions in the article in ways that don't engage with the author's fundamental humanity. They are treating it like an alien artifact reflecting on a far-off culture.

What if readers came in, reacted with warmth and kindness and empathy and compassion, and engaged with the article in a way that validated the author's experiences while perhaps gently questioning the article's conclusions? Would that be cold?

Or would the abject failure to reflect when confronted with key truths from the life of a real person make you sick to your stomach?

I seem to run into more and more responses like this these days. Instead of responding to any specific comment a person has written, it attempts to paint any differing opinion as being somehow immoral. I can't say that this type of approach is conducive to open discussion.

It's one of those articles you either relate to or don't and if you don't, you're going to pick up on the flaws. Not everyone that fails to relate will complain about those flaws, but any article designed to evoke emotions - as this one is - will inevitably stir up irritation in some, and those so stirred will complain about them.

Written differently, but with the same message, it would carry more people with it, but then maybe those that related would relate less well, so maybe that would be a net loss.

This doesn't surprise me one bit. Tech is just another white collar country club. The rules are just slightly different than the bankers country club and the surgeons country club and the lawyer's country club.

If you're not one of the people who typically joins that kind of club you can hack it but you won't feel like you belong or you might but it will take you many years.

Soooooo much of this article is relatable to me. I remember my first office job, I couldn't snap myself out of the habit of asking my boss for a break to go to the bathroom. He finally said "You don't need to ask me, just go, jeez." I was just so used to jobs where you had to ask.

The time clock thing too! To this day, the back of my mind still wonders if I punched in and whether all my hours are being counted. Can't just walk away from those habits once internalized.

The culture difference is so real. I remember sitting in a meeting with a bunch of managers just a little higher on the totem pole than me. Not executives by any stretch. And they were all complaining about their taxes, the cost of private school for their kids, and the fact that they can't find a good second nanny. I'm just sitting there thinking "If I lose this job, I'm living in my car." Really hard to consider these guys my peers, and I know that affects my work and my working relationship with them.

So the article resounded with me, because being raised by my grandparents on a family citrus farm during the transition thru the NAFTA years and watching my family loose what little land wealth they had. It left an indelible mark, a mark of insecurity and fear and it lead to behavior like this.

I remember one time, when I just started out in tech, I went to an interview for a group that was contracting for NASA, the interview went very well, they loved me, the team loved me. I pretty much had the job. The team liked me so much that they invited me to lunch. I declined, you could tell the temperature changed at that very moment that I did. I did not get the job, and in retrospect I should have just told them I am not in the position to pay for a meal out at this time. I had literally put my last pennies into the tank of my car to get to that interview.

Anyways, I back story that, to say this; I did well in the industry, I have exited a few companies and I have held some pretty impressive titles at some pretty big orgs but I never got rich. Some of that had to do with dragging my family out of poverty but some of it had to do with something else. I helped build a startup and we sold that startup for a good deal of money. I received a pittance because I did not know my value. It was enough to take off some of life's stresses but it was not FU money. I went to work for one of the companies that we had a B2B relationship with that was a downstream provider to the company we sold. Anyways it was here that things changed for me, and it was not because of me or my work. It was because the CEO of that company became my personal friend. Her name was Sheila and she told me something that I had never heard before and that was this.

She told me that I was what she calls institutionally poor. That I had been conditioned thru my childhood to think like a poor person and in doing so you send out unconscious signals to others. She told me this because she came up similar. She told me that it causes you to over analyze and over estimate risk and therefore you will not take the bold moves that people that don't have to worry do. That while you can change the world and everyone see it. If you hold onto the fear on needing your safety net under you, that you will never extract your true value from other. So I said, so you are going to pay me my fair value, she laughed and said no, I got you for a very good deal. 3 Days latter I walked into her office, with my resignation letter and told her I had an offer from another company. She said, now you get it, how much did they offer. I told her, and she said I will double that if you stay. That was when I learned a tangential lesson, and that is sometimes hard ass, ball busters are the best people.

Point being there is a piece of this, that the person that grew up poor has to break themselves free of and many times they don't even know what they need to free themselves of and that is thinking like a poor person.

You have a much more sunny view of HN readers than I do; I was expecting to see a whole bunch of victim-blaming and complete lack of understanding of what it's like to be broke. I was delightedly surprised to see your comment as the top one when I looked.

Introspection is expensive, and recognizing that behaviors that benefit you personally cause undesirable damage in someone else can be the most expensive of all.

Most people will actively avoid it, it just makes their existence harder for no concrete benefit to them.

Food for thought.

As someone who was very por growing up and worked their ass off to become who I am today, everything she said is 100% true of being poor and not an artifact of a bad attitude. If anything, the fact she sees the opportunities for free lunches and tampons shows she's actaulyl got a GOOD attitude and is resourceful. All of those things are indicative of an observant, hard worker.

> you can't buy your way out of the mindset, or snap your fingers / empty the cache / cycle the power the way the average HN commenter seems to think you can.

Reading the list, most of them are pretty harmless if not annoying. But one struck me as something completely different:

> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was afraid to seek mentorship from anyone above me, convinced that even asking would seem like bothersome begging. I watched the people around me network effortlessly, assured of favors and good words put in. I could only think in terms of what I could offer and how I could survive; they were thinking on the next level where they never had to wonder if they were good enough. They were to the business-class manner born, at least.

Seaweed Snack vs Cheetos is a class thing, and maybe cultural (I could see people of East-Asians origins reaching for the seaweed more than the Cheetos).

But not being able to get help or mentoring and to network is an enormous barrier to career progression.

I don't know I'm not thrilled to be this negative or correct about this but it's been pretty much exactly what I expected.

The author is complaining of being poor and talking about a lifestyle that her coworkers enjoy that I, who am quite well off, can't afford either. That doesn't make her poor, it makes her not wealthy.

While I'm sure if I met her in person I'd feel very sympathetic, it is difficult to read about someone being unhappy because they can't take a 3-day holiday in Greece; can't collect antiquities or be driven to work by a chauffeur every day. These are not goals I'm sympathetic with either.

I honestly don't care if someone is poor in relative terms to their co-workers either. I'm only interested in what my coworkers earn in the first place because it strengthens my bargaining position.

I guess the unfortunate reality is that many of the people who engage in the behaviors that make people feel isolated go on the defensive when the harmfulness of their behavior is highlighted.

I completely agree with you. I was also shocked about this disconnect and explain-it-away statements. Very disappointing.

>Many of the comments on this article are so cold. I can’t believe it. When I read the original article I was imagining all the constructive ways HN readers would interpret it and hold a mirror up to their own behaviour.

Why expect that though? Many of the HN readers are exactly the out-of-touch persons criticized in the article.

Expecting HN commenters not to behave like the vapid nuts they're they're mocked as on n-gate is a big ask ;-)

It unfortunately seems that many people in the tech world are very pro-capitalism and defensive of their own wealth. The attitude seems to boil down to "I got mine" with little to no consideration of others. Specifically, as regulation begins to intensify in the tech sphere, there's this feeling of people coming for their piece of the pie.

Which seems pretty far from the point, but those people could view this as just another attack on their estate. They might feel like they deserve it, and deserve to act that way. This article highlights the ugly side, where someone who isn't already indoctrinated into that elitism is rubbing shoulders with the type who are used to the privilege available to those of us with longer running tech careers. And it looks bad. So in response, I suppose it inspires those people to circle the wagons and just accuse the author or not getting theirs effectively enough.

You’re the top comment on HN right now. What are you exactly complaining about?