Wow what a useless post. A job can be difficult without being physically laborious.

Guy who's worked at the same cushy ass desk job for 17 years is waxing poetic about sweat-labor hard work? Annnnnd he's a white dude with millions of dollars? Aaaaaannd his image is of immigrants working talking about picking lettuce?

LMFAO.

Hard to take this even remotely serious. I left being a dirt-under-your-fingernails-7-days-a-week diesel engine mechanic job in the military to be a designer and even I know better than to write something like this.

Well guys, guess I'm going to quit my job for the nobler pastures of hard labor. Maybe I'll fashion a wheel out of some stone by beating it my bare fists like a real worker and then roll it up a mountain.

Yeah, I've always wondered exactly what "hard work" is. I tend to think I work hard when I'm switching gears and staying busy, but no, I'm not picking lettuce. It seems like such a relative thing too, since you can compare any kind of labor to something infinitely worse, like, I don't know, the Gulag.

I mean, I get it, but...ok? Kind of a weird thing to rant about.

If you ask those lettuce pickers "What is hard?". I am sure they will say computers. All I am trying to say is it's subjective.

Huh, good old comparison of physical and mental labour?

Work smart, not hard.

And how we define hard?

Is picking a lettuce hard? Is writing a machine learning algorithm hard? Which one creates more value?

Oh and it doesn't take at least 4 years of studying to become a junior lettuce picker.

I'm wondering what qualifies him to say what is and isn't "hard" work. I'm curious about how many manual labor jobs (his benchmark of difficulty) he's worked himself to give him perspective to write this.

Most of all, though, I'd love to hear what he thinks about his own company. Since he works in tech—and not on a farm picking lettuce—starting, growing, and managing his multi-million dollar company must not have ever involved hard work... right? Hell, if we're going there, why should he even bother giving his employees all those nice benefits if their work is not hard? If their work isn't "hard", then they shouldn't need any of that stuff, right?

I might have taken this a little far, but my point remains: This man seems wholly unqualified to define "hard work" means for everyone else.

Once lazy knowledge workers have fully automated most if not all manual labor, I wonder what comparisons will be left to melodramatically guilt them into feeling like what they do isn't "virtuous" enough.

Maybe the 2040 version of this post will read... "Knowledge workers don't do real, hard work...like ...sitting at home living off basic income?"

Wonder how many are here reading this because their job is competitive and staying on top of the industry through sources of information like Designer News is the only way to ensure they aren't replaced by someone younger. But hey, it isn't manual labor so it's basically not work!

A comment from the bottom of that post says it all.

"Hard work is subjective and you come off self-righteously indignant"

Okay... I wonder from where that anger came from.