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Comment by trashtester

3 years ago

SWE's are not the only ones that think that their pay is low compared to their intelligence level, their education level, how tough, inconvenient or important their work is or what they feel they deserve for some other reason.

For instance, I'm sure there are plenty of HR managers in various companies that are secretly furious about all the young young mostly males, mostly white or asian, still in their 20s, join the company and make more than they do.

I'm sure HR managers know that the majority of jobs they are hiring for are different from the job they're in, with different pay scales and demographics.

Infact I'd say it's their profession.

  • Also, HR Manager is a low-risk job.

    Recruiter is the high-risk equivalent.

    So not only do you compete with a lot of people for the job, the pay structure does not depend on performance.

    • Maybe, but I've also seen HR departments be the first to go in lean times.

      We effectively didn't have an HR department at my previous job, at a company of 500+ people. And they did when I first started, about a dozen people.

>SWE's are not the only ones that think that their pay is low compared to their intelligence level, their education level, how tough, inconvenient or important their work is or what they feel they deserve for some other reason.

Sure, but it doesn’t mean some or all of them are not right, especially when the unequal distribution of wealth is well known and documented to evolve for the worst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Global_...

Why would the ethnicity or sex matter when these HR managers would still see the same differences regardless of ethnicity or sex?

Either way, I'd think twice about putting HR managers as victims here when they are the main perpetrators of low raise budgets and high hiring budgets.

  • When people see that some other group of people, with identity traits different from themselves, are doing better than themselves on some metric, it often induces resentment. That's just a fact.

    Whether its justified or not, varies with circumstances and what ethical system people have.

    When black people in the 50's felt that way about white people and their privileges, most people today would see those concerns as justified.

    When German people in 1922 became angry because most jews had enough money for food, while many Germans went hungry, and started believing in conspiracy theories, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, most people today would say they were not justified. (though there are still some who secrely believe those things)

    And when Hutu's wanted to "cut down the tall trees" in 1994, most people in the west only read the headlines, and didn't care that much.

    In the case of HR managers being unhappy that software developer make more than them, some will blame some generic "wage gap", others will explicitly believe in some kind of Patriarchy conspiracy theory. (And a lot of HR managers, of course, are simply fine with things as they are.)

    • > When German people in 1922 became angry because most jews had enough money for food, while many Germans went hungry

      Even if this were true, and it isn’t, people didn’t start believing in anti-Jewish propaganda because the Jews had more to eat than the average German. People always believed in crazy anti-Jewish propaganda since, at least, the first crusade.

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    • I have a hard time believing the reaction would be any different if a bunch of older white collars would stare at young Hispanic software devs making more instead of Asian devs. Only difference being they couldn't hide their jealousy behind politics.

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HR managers are rarely ever intelligent. The work they do doesn’t require it and intelligent people don’t want to do a job where they’ll be surrounded by lower intelligence people.

  • Maybe some HR managers believe that empathy and "EQ" are more important than IQ?

    Maybe they even think that intelligence is a social construct invented by the Patriarchy for the purpose of oppressing people who are not "cis white males"?

    Who knows, maybe for some, these ideas may even have been part of their education....

    • > Maybe some HR managers believe that empathy and "EQ" are more important than IQ?

      Have you ever interacted with HR? I'm pretty sure they are trained to be cold and uncaring, and to apply business rules without exception. Never heard an ounce of empathy from any of them, it always feels like interacting with an automaton that was somehow annoyed with you.

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    • > Maybe some HR managers believe that empathy and "EQ" are more important than IQ?

      > Maybe they even think that intelligence is a social construct invented by the Patriarchy for the purpose of oppressing people who are not "cis white males"?

      Are you agreeing or disagreeing with the person you replied to?

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