An event that will always stay with me, some years ago I a job opened up where I would have some sway in recommending candidates. I had a uni friend who would fit the role well. A great bloke, smart and hard working. He came from a very blue collar, low income background. His job was pretty middle of the road stuff.
This job would have been lateral in responsibility but in a better industry giving about 2+ times salary. I mentioned this role and said I would get him a chat with the hiring manager. They seemed interested. I said you can double your salary. At this point they got cold feet and said 'it sounds too important for me'. I told them I knew the job, that it would suit them and I wouldn't burn my own credibility if I want confident they would succeed. But they money spooked them.
And while this was a sample of one it really opened my eyes to sense of entitlement that comes with growing up in a wealthy vs poor enviroment. And simply the expectations you approach life with, having a overriding effect on natural ability.
There are so many variable in play for this its not a one issue answer but I suspect this one is more important than we typically give it credit for. An expectation on oneself of where we should end up based on how we grow up.
I once had a conversation with a very, very experienced developer who ran a local meetup and was discussing salary options at a new job. He balked when I told them what I asked for, and replied:
"Just because you grew up as poor as me doesn't mean you should fear wealth. If it makes you feel that guilty take the shit and donate it to charity."
And its really true.
My first engineering job I made almost 3x what my mother ever made in a year over her entire life's highest salary.
I was a college dropout that was enthusiastic and knew enough to be functional.
It really is a strange, new thing to come from nothing and all of a sudden be able to go out to eat at an Applebee's without worrying about your finances for a month.
Edit: The first thing I did after collecting my first 'engineering paycheck' was go out to Applebees and get an appetizer, a drink, AND an entree, and then proceed to not worry about it.
My father was a high school director. It was a 900-student school for lowerclass jobs, with... well, many lowerclass situations with students who hadn't necessarily ever touched a phone, in the 80s. Part of the job was managing financial resources and deciding of his own salary. He decided to lower it, because he didn't feel like he needed that much. And he decided to apply it retroactively upon two years. He gave money back to his school. I wonder whether I'm plain selfish for thinking he would have had better credit taking the money (even to give it to charities) than returning money to a public institution. But I find the gesture admirable.
> It really is a strange, new thing to come from nothing and all of a sudden be able to go out to eat at an Applebee's without worrying about your finances for a month.
This. I come from a background where ordering pizza was a special event. We weren't poor poor, but we had to be careful.
I'm getting more used to eating out and getting takeout, but I still read the menu right-to-left (prices first) even though 99% of the time it really doesn't matter.
Maybe someday I'll stop feeling guilty for not ordering the cheapest thing on the menu. Took me 2 years to get used to appetizers.
It's a weird feeling to walk out of a store with a bag full of stuff and realize you have no idea how much any of it cost. Whenever that happens I think of that minor scandal when the nation found out the Clintons(?) didn't know the price of a gallon of milk.
I see not having to know prices as one of the best perks of being decently well off. I've had to count every penny when I was younger, and look for cheaper alternatives, and defer purchases, and it made money one of the big stressful things in my life.
Eventually arning enough that I could stop thinking about it other than checking my balance now and again was far more liberating than any of the subsequent improvements in my finances.
But I would like to add to it. Not only is it emotionally liberating to be better off, but it actually frees you up practically as well. Like you said: count pennies, look for cheap alternatives, defer purchases. If I wanted to buy something when I was younger, I would save money for a year, then spend hours/days/weeks comparing prices, waiting for deals, etc. This lingered deep in me, and I had a hard time shaking it as an adult. It's only recently that I can decide to buy something, have a quick look at what's good and where it's cheapest, and then buy it.
I never want to go the other direction and purely equate time with money, but to some extent any of the meaningless time I spent worrying about money I now can make money, and when I don't feel like it, I can have time off, without worrying.
Sorry for the rant, but what I really wanted to get to is: Having money means having time and energy to learn more ~= making more money.
I remember a quote about the best part of wealth being that you never feel like you need to cheat another person.
I can't google the source of it (you get some really weird results about rich men cheating, or being cheated on) but it always stuck with me as something to be grateful for every day.
Obviously, some rich people however, never got the memo.
Seriously. Probably the biggest mentality shift I had was when I stopped looking at receipts/prices. At this point, the only prices I ever pay attention to are travel ones (hotels/airfare).
Speaking of ordering a pizza, I remember visiting a very cheap pizza place in my home town. It was during a year I earned around $200k, and the pizza over there was around $4 (whole pizza, not just a piece).
While I was waiting in line, an elderly couple entered. It looked like it was a big event for them - average earnings in Poland are around $10k/yr, for them it was probably a half of that.
They looked at the prices, I think they asked about something cheaper, or sth.. I don't remember the details, but I remember them leaving because it seemed it was too expensive for them.
If I had more wit, I would just buy them dinner, and make up some kind of a story of me celebrating or sth, so it wouldn't look like a charity. I didn't, because I seriously didn't know how to react...
Some other time, I remember getting into an argument with a bum a Warsaw city center. Bums in Warsaw are much cleaner than the ones in SF or in States in general. I don't know why...
Anyway, I had a good day, so I told him I will buy him a warm sandwich. He followed me to the shop, and I told him to pick the biggest and best one he wants (biggest one being $5 vs. $2 smallest, again, pocket change in US).
The guy was literally unable to make any kind of a choice. The lady at the counter asked him for a kind of meat, and he couldn't choose which one he wanted. My bet was that he was unused to a situation of abundance of anything...
Anyway, he finally managed to make the choice, with my help. I remember how grateful he was. He ended by shaking my hand, and saying something about having a dark past, being a part of SB (kind of like polish KGB) and doing a ton of bad things to people before 1989...
That's some of my recent memories. I still remember reading menus from right to left, and I try to buy people food whenever I can, and whenever it won't make things awkward...
This is a throw away account. I'm writing this because I'm the embodiment of poor and the embodiment of lack of social mobility.
As a child of divorce, I lived in affluent suburbia. However, everything was devoted to keeping the house and to food. There was next to nothing for anything else. I had three jobs going through high school. When I was in school I was told that I couldn't qualify for financial aid because of how much money my father made. His life was dedicated to revenge on my mother and he spent HUGE swaths of money to avoid paying $200/month in child support. Getting money from him for tuition or getting him to sign on the student loan forms was an impossibility. Ironically, I had none of the advantages of being poor.
Graduating average was going to be 96%. They kicked me out at the last minute almost. Truancy. I had the flu for a couple of days. Doctor's note required. The father trying to make my mother's life a living hell by yelling everyday at school administrators did not help either. Nothing in my life was stranger than having a school administrator that I had never previously interacted with tell me that they want to kick me out of the school simply to make life easier for themselves.
Finding employment in 'my field' had not been easy. Usually I worked at mind numbing non-WDS Windows 7 deployments for a one or two month stint. I have not been able to ever get work 'in my field' that paid over $20,000 USD per year. I've had employment where I was programming at minimum wage and the clients were billed $3000 USD per day for my work. Respectfully negotiating was of course fruitless in this situation. I've been in this sort of situation several times. The worst people seem to find me and take advantage. Usually, pay to billing factors are between 5-10.
I started to not want to interact with employers in person. I started making my living making making Android Apps for clients on RFQ sites until 2014. I was getting paid from $50 to $400 per app or app framework. One client took one project and now has over 100 million users across a dozen similar apps. I was hoping I could start to charge more but that never seemed to happen. The best thing that happened was that I had people halfway around the world constantly hounding me to work at what was essentially still minimum wage.
I am lucky because I took an early interest in Bitcoin. I'm willingly hiding in the lowest caste of society. I'm trying to work on myself. I'd like to be treated like a human being one day by an employer, when I am ready.
I'm not writing this to ask for help. I'm writing this to say that the stigma of being at the bottom is very very real. And while it, at least for me, has predominatly been an internal battle of asserting self-worth, there are definitely people who saw the precarious situation that I was in and use it for their advantage. Or to revel in being cruel.
I mean this respectfully, but have you tried to do some introspection?
If you actually have the skills you claim, there is huge money to be made in hiring you as a programmer making $40k/year. Your background really should not be such a determining factor: I have clients who have literally never met me and have only the vaguest idea of who I am. It's all about making compelling work and demanding compensation for it.
If you think this is impossible, I would happily be that guy and pay you $40/hr (which is under market but a hell of a lot more than $20k a year) to work on client projects.
Speaking as a relatively new parent, what your father did is unfathomable to me.
It sounds like you got great skills, but need to be connected to someone who just doesn't take advantage of them. Were you working on Kerbal Space Program? Those devs surely got a raw deal too. Sadly the world is full of people caring only for themselves. But there are exceptions, and hopefully it'll be your turn to come across some of them soon.
I was going to say, can you do your own project? But it can be very hard to get started with that, finding the right idea etc. (At least it is for me.)
At any rate, essentially, just wanted to wish you all the best for the future.
Yes, I've a couple projects. A couple are more popular than others. My own stuff has about two million total users. But for about the last four months, I've been working exclusively on creating some (combinatorial) design theory algorithms.
2 million users, that's fantastic work - and the algo stuff sounds like a page turner in the making as well. Keep at it, and please don't ever discount your own worth.
(Not that I'm massively successful myself or anything. In fact, I'm currently unemployed and seeking .net roles, after redundancy; facing difficulties with this as I have only just under 1y of .net xp even as I've done development for 20. Refreshing / learning new skills on SOLID, DDD, CQRS, EventSourcing, etc, and trying to keep chin up. I have faith and refuse to go back to my old tools that are just about dead anyway, even though there's the odd contract coming up. Love C# and .net.)
>And while this was a sample of one it really opened my eyes to sense of entitlement that comes with growing up in a wealthy vs poor enviroment.
In the UK, the primary selling points of the Public School system (i.e. private schools priced far out of the reach of most of the population) are three things - social confidence, entitlement and a sense of superiority, and networking.
Conversely, the primary products of the state educational system are low confidence, low expectations, and exclusion from social capital.
It's a perfectly rigid and self-sustaining caste system. Of course a few individuals break out of it, but the social and economic effect is deadening.
Although wealth and opportunity aren't fairly distributed, there's a more subtly destructive effect on the rich. I've known people who grew up with huge privilege, and some of them have been very successful, because all that education and opportunity allowed them to explore and develop their talents.
But I've known others who have been crushed by their backgrounds. They can appear successful outwardly, but in fact they've never developed an independent sense of themselves outside of their families and their wealth.
This usually happens in families that are externally wealthy but emotionally austere or even neglectful. It's a particularly toxic combination socially because these people can end up having wealth, influence, and power, but their emotions and humanity are stunted and crippled.
Wealth inequalities can cover up these deeper issues of neglect and sometimes outright abuse. And if these people become politically influential, they tend to repeat their abuse on a much wider and more destructive scale.
There's also a lot of complicated signaling that says I Am Elite Like You. Hard to pick up on or transmit out if you're not in on it, and I don't think people in it are doing it consciously.
I'm from a region of the UK that when people, especially abroad, hear me speak they ask why I don't sound as expected. They have been to where I am from or met other people from there and think I sound "posh". I'm not posh at all but grew up in the middle of nowhere and that's just the accent people there have. Posh is my friend Graham who pronounces his name as "grah-am". Graham's annual school fees where half the annual wage of the shop manager where I worked as a student.
> In the UK, the primary selling points of the Public School system ... are social confidence, entitlement and a sense of superiority, and networking.
> It's a perfectly rigid and self-sustaining caste system.
The problem with your statement is that all 3 qualities you have listed could actually be acquired at the cost of $0, either by the parents raising their children differently or by the child itself if it desires so.
Therefore I can't agree that it is anything resembling a caste system. (in such systems there'd be use of force for anyone who steps out of line)
The only way that I see how you could argue that these examples prove that it's a caste system is if you denied that there is free will. Yes, if there's no free will then we only react predictably to the environment like mindless machines so being unable to put your children into private schools will cause them to be poor if they don't have some amazing genetical quality that allows them to transcend the competition.
I strongly oppose this line of thinking. Why? Because it leads to Nihilism and a sense that everything (including your own life) is worthless. It would also allow you to do whatever you want without following any moral code if you take this philosophy to its logical extreme.
Edit: What I mean by that is that it's not like parents do not have choices, no matter how poor. They can teach their kids moral values and discipline, they can encourage them to do something useful with their lives. And the child also can do something about its situation once it gets older.
The economist Thomas Sowell made the very strong argument in one of his books that it is actually culture (= set of all social norms and rules) that determines success of a group. For example some Asian cultures or Jews have always been highly successful, no matter where they immigrated to and no matter how much they were persecuted. In case of the Jews they've faced unequal treatment and persecution for thousands of years.
So what makes them able to overcome all odds? They raise their children with certain values (I doubt its the religious values) that make them (on average) outcompete the children of all others.
So it doesn't matter that much if I'm poor, if I'm rich or what skin color I happen to be born with. If I'm white and from the upper class and decide to use the N word in every other sentence, dress like a Gangsta Rapper with pants down to my knees and have no discipline or work ethic then I'm likely going to fail hard in life. If I'm black and decide to learn how to speak eloquently and dress well then I might become the US president.
Culture is learned behavior that is transmitted from one person to another. If your parents don't know elite cultural norms and your schoolmates don't know elite cultural norms, then how exactly is a child supposed to learn elite accents and elite cultural norms?
There is a staggering number of parents who are struggling to keep their children fed and in a moderately stable home life, and a staggering number of kids who go to school hungry nonetheless. More than any other first-world nation, the US tolerates a high rate of poverty and economic inequality, which is what drives our average standardized test performance down (for example). "Half the children need to starve to motivate the others" is not only an obscene moral argument, it drags everybody down.
> Culture is learned behaviour that is transmitted from one person to another.
Essentially yes, though I don't mean to say that some religion or some culture in the sense of history, music, food and arts is lesser than others. All I'm saying is that some cultures strongly reinforce certain qualities that help children being successful. I'm not a Jew or an Asian, but I do try to learn what is useful about these cultures so I can apply it myself.
> If your parents don't know elite cultural norms and your schoolmates don't know elite cultural norms, then how exactly is a child supposed to learn elite accents and elite cultural norms?
I did exactly that which you seem to believe is impossible or very hard. I'm from a immigrant family that started with nothing in a western EU country and I became part of the top 1%.
What I can tell you about my experience is that I did not know the elite accents but some universal qualities like strong discipline (I never did any kind of drug), dedication to work hard and the wish to compete (I'm not the kind of guy that uses his elbows to get in front) were reinforced by my parents. I also tried (not always successful) to keep away from people who act destructive or totally lack focus in life.
Now about the part with the struggling parents and hungry children:
First of all I believe it is an extreme exaggeration to say that half the children need to starve, I actually believe that no child needs to starve in the US or go to school hungry.
All kinds of welfare institutions are in place that would prevent that from happening. But we still both know that it does happen, even though everyone gets the necessary resources from the government to prevent that from happening. (at least here in the EU)
I'm willing to bet that in most cases it is caused by bad decisions of the parents. Decisions like abusing alcohol, drugs or wasting money. (gambling, buying products they can't afford)
The question is if it is even possible to prevent this from happening, even if you expand the welfare state. I doubt it. I believe this issue will always exist as there'll always be people that make lots of very bad decisions because they have the freedom to do so. (I assume you don't want to take everyones freedom in the process of achieving equal outcomes)
On the other hand the welfare state incentivises those who are dependant to stay dependant (a job would have to be really well paid to offset the tax punishment and very safe as well because if they are fired early they will often disqualify for welfare payments for a few months - could be fatal for many) and this situation also wears these people mentally down and causes divorces, which leads to a further breakdown of society as a whole. (see divorce rate today - or see birth rates in the EU which is in the process of going full Socialist)
And then there are tons of regulations that make it very expensive to hire someone for businesses (minimum wage, bureaucratic red tape) which further worsens the situation for poor people. A hundred years ago anyone with two arms and two legs could find a job in the US, even if it was only day - to - day. We certainly do not want that everyone stays in low pay jobs, but starting doing _something_ would change the life of most persons who are dependant on welfare today. Chances are they'd learn new skills and become more valuable as an employee over time and it would on top of that improve their sense of being in control of their own life.
But the way it is now you can't ever find a job if you have no skills whatsoever. How could a business pay an Afghan guy who barely speaks English the government mandated $15 minimum wage without going broke? The business wont and the Afghan guy will stay dependant and will have to live in a depressing situation.
If you are interested I can recommend the Milton Friedman series "Free to Choose" (from the 1980s), in specific Part 5 which is all about the welfare state:
I was just getting ready to make a reply along the lines of who cares what outcomes for rich kids are as long as there is opportunity for non rich kids. That is to say, who cares if little Richie Ritch will succeed 100% of the time because of his wealth, as long as your average poor can succeed provided they put in the work (i.e., isn't denied opportunity).
Your comment took a way different direction than I was expecting and genuinely made me reflect.
You see, I grew up extremely poor (yes, those "hoods" you hear about), and figure it's possible to make it out. But, I do do what you mentioned above A LOT. To the point that some times I feel guilty expensing my cell phone even though it's a perk.
I grew up privileged -- and in most decades, fairly rich. But I definately feel guilty about expensing things. I think that's just because my personality is pretty diffident.
Though, as I started earning money myself and not living off my family, I became more open to enjoying the perks that are offered me.
There may be some interplay with Impostor Syndrome, but IMO what is being discussed here is a different thing, for which there may be a more specific name... but if so I'm unaware of it.
Impostor syndrome is pretty much universal (insomuch as it crosses class/economy boundaries) whereas what has been mentioned here is a sort of anti-entitlement very specific to people who grew up poor. People in this situation are often afraid to ask for what they are worth (to the point where they will sabotage their careers to some degree as noted in Gustomaximus post), are generally afraid of authority even when there is no reason to be or the authority isn't actually an authority over them, etc.
I've definitely seen and experienced this phenomenon myself speaking as someone who grew up fairly poor -- single-mom American poor (which, as all things are relative, is quite different than seriously-might-starve poor... at least for now).
It sounds a little like learned helplessness ... having spent some time in the UK I have noticed this unquestioning deference to "ones betters" and I wonder how it comes about. How is this trait acquired?
I got it from my father, who rose from poor to wealthy through education. He taught me that education was all that mattered. When I achieved a prestigious Silicon Valley position after dropping out of college, I considered myself a fake who would be discovered at any moment for a long time. All my colleagues had compsci degrees. Thing is, I eventually discovered that I could hold my own. What my father taught me is only one way to achieve success, as I later realized. But that he taught it as dogma crippled me for a long time.
It is acquired socially. The UK has a formalised class system dating back to the "divine right of kings". The "ruling elite" are rather literal as the membership of the upper house (House of Lords) is limited to hereditary peerage.
92 out of 813 seats are hereditary peers, the remainder are life peers [Edit: forgot the Bishops] appointed (technically) by the monarch on the advice of the government.
There's really no such thing as a class 'system', let alone anything one could point to as being 'formal'. There is a bunch of in/out group signalling with fairly extreme geographic variations. Mobility across social boundaries can be achieved by understanding and adapting to the signalling although crucially (and getting back on topic) this requires the belief that you are entitled to do so.
I'm down on the notion of class in general personally. I think it's at best an incredibly lazy intellectual model of complex social phenomena. Basically I think there's no such thing [0], but I do very much enjoy listening to the things people say while they're explaining why I'm wrong about this.
[0] Problematic for this theory is that people certainly believe there is and this has operational effects.
I have seen this before. Some people will only take a job if they KNOW how to do the job. Others will take a job, and are confident they can learn it along the way.
It might have more to do with that confidence than being poor.
One distinction that I like to make is that in my own life, I've definitely been poor, but I've never been in poverty. I've been a student and I've been unemployed almost without money to even get food occasionally, but I've always been in a position where I could ask my (middle-class) mother for a bit of cash to tide me over (or even move back 'home' for a while.
I have never had to ask, but that option/safety net has always been there. That, to me, is the difference between merely being poor (a transient state) and living in poverty (no simple escape route).
Hell, even simply knowing that you can escape poverty is an advantage that some people don't have.
I grew up poor, and after my first bout of college, I only had $400 to my name, nowhere to go, no job, and 28 days until rent was due. I spent that month freezing in an empty apartment eating potatoes with soy sauce on them. And then may landlord wants to play "this is a stupid college kid" and starts claiming that I must keep paying rent until I can find a new lessee (which I didn't.) Nevermind that I always payed my rent 3 months in advance.
These kinds of experiences really color your perspective on wealth. There's no reason for some well-off, undereducated, underworked adult to literally threaten the survival of another person simply because they're too lazy to do their own job for a business they owned.
I remember this lifestyle pretty well, for me it was rice with various homemade sauces, a big bag of rice was $5 and that could last me a couple of weeks if it was all I ate.
One benefit is that I was an overweight child, being too poor to eat properly brought me to a "perfect" BMI for my age.
Random trivia, the real person that song was written about, is the wife of Valve Economist and recent "star" of the debate around Greek economic issues with the EU, Yanis Varoufakis.
This is particular true if you have a mortgage and children to feed. For the sake of keeping the house and bringing food to the table, the majority of people will gladly accept less salary for greater job security.
I mean it worked for me. I took some really risky decisions that could easily result in me being homeless, etc. Most of them paid out so far. I guess it's up to your priorities - I would rather fail hard than settle for being where I am right now in the long term - taking risks is the only option.
This job would have been lateral in responsibility but in a better industry giving about 2+ times salary. I mentioned this role and said I would get him a chat with the hiring manager. They seemed interested. I said you can double your salary. At this point they got cold feet and said 'it sounds too important for me'. I told them I knew the job, that it would suit them and I wouldn't burn my own credibility if I want confident they would succeed. But they money spooked them.
And while this was a sample of one it really opened my eyes to sense of entitlement that comes with growing up in a wealthy vs poor enviroment. And simply the expectations you approach life with, having a overriding effect on natural ability.
There are so many variable in play for this its not a one issue answer but I suspect this one is more important than we typically give it credit for. An expectation on oneself of where we should end up based on how we grow up.