>A lot of people on HN are very out of touch with the realities of the working class.

Yeah, I'm always amused (and even dumbfounded) by some of the stuff I see in threads here. I'll screenshot stuff and shoot it off to friends and we'll just laugh at how entirely different beliefs, and sometimes even how delusional stuff tech people believe, can be.

I find common differences tend to be gender-issues, compensation expectations, thinking it's wholly ok to spend 10-15$ a meal for an individual on some meal delivery service, finding cars idiotic and unnecessary, thinking anything less than a 2-3k$ macbook might as well be an abacus, travel, time off etc.

Here in the midwest, you're quite happy if you get 2-3 weeks of vacation a year, you can't survive without a car, for many travel is a luxury and international travel is a rarity yet when I was in San Francisco I noticed on every popular dating app person after person with mention of 'been to 3 countries this year' '87 countries and still going' and photo after photo in different exotic locations standing in front of pyramids on two continents as well as laying next to a tiger or painted bright colors with an elephant... I was like yeahhhhh I have nothing in common with these people...

It really concerns me. In my most recent blog post I call YC out directly a bit because here they are the 'kingmakers' of the bay area and they still have this myopic view of things. The partners are founders of companies that did well, Sam was in the first batch if I recall correctly, Seibel has run 2 companies through, almost every single partner and co-founder of YC have at minimum a 4-year degree (Sam and maybe 1 or 2 others being the exception) several have masters, some have multiple masters and there's a few with doctorates. Most of them have lived in the bay area for many years, their friends are largely in the bay area, their partners/spouses are bay area culture...

Bay Area culture is not what 90% of the country is like, California itself is quite an oddity compared to rest of the country. Mutli-million dollars homes and apartments, semi-functional public transportation, app company, interview with 3-5 people to see if you're a 'fit for the company culture, do you have our vibe mannnn' is fucking alien. The blue-blooded, several thousand dollar suit, fortune 500 corporation I work for doesn't give a shit if 'you fit the company culture' they care if you can sit there as a serial number and churn out work.

Catered lunches every day, vitamin water? Dude! I've worked every Thanksgiving for the past 12 years and will again this year, in an office job, and you know what we will get? Day or two old bagels and some off-brand milk. The water that comes out of the GREEN AND WHITE stainless steel spigots in the 'kitchen' at work comes out milky, no vitamins but plenty of calcium and lime! And if the wind is right, we get to breathe jet exhaust, inside our office, a few hundred yards from some runways and our team at our hub, gets to breathe jet fuel all night as the planes idle outside of the building and that exhaust comes right inside.

It's so strange. There's such a disconnect between tech types and the rest of the world. Tens of thousands of people walked out of Google to protest, after being told it was perfectly ok. At one of my jobs, I got sun poisoning and had to make sure I didn't throw up (from the sun poisoning) in the graves I was digging and you know what, at that point in my life I was 100% fine with it because it was the best money I'd ever made and a little sun poisoning and sweating a few pounds of water weight a day was perfectly acceptable! Or how about throwing trucks for a dollar above minimum wage all year long, basically at whatever temperature outside was, ha I'd like to see a lot of tech types try that for more than a month.

sigh