As an addendum, let me emphasize: if someone is making 10^{5.5} dollars per year, they're rich. My point is that economic disparity is so incredibly bad in the US that being "rich" doesn't mean one has anything meaningfully in common with "owner-class rich" in terms of political power *or* security with respect to having basic needs met. It is a mistake for someone who is rich to think that it is not in their best interest to show solidarity with other laborers.

@xgranade I feel like "rich" as a word is very bad, because it fails to draw the difference between upper middle-class and owner-class. I personally earn a high wage, but I'm completely working class. I've talked to people who make much more money than me, some of them business owners and owning houses, but none of them are "safe". For money, you can buy convenience - and if you make a lot, you can even dream or buy a house, which is a necessity. But there are lightyears between that and someone like Bezos.

And yeah, tech people really have no class consciousness - they think if they buy more convenience, they are hot shit. A lot delude themselves with right-wing talking points, thinking the oppressive politics won't harm them based on some ideological reason. It's frustrating. Join a union.

@imyxh I guess when you put it that way, yeah, I fundamentally disagree, I think that's a fundamentally inhumane way of looking at things, and I think that view is part of how we got to where we are now, where the only people who can have any confidence in their ability to do things like buy medicine also can do things like buy entire governments.

@xgranade yes, an inhumane system has created an inhumane sentiment in the lower class. not something we can really blame them for. it is a sentiment that exists, and so long as it does, i don't think there can be much shared class consciousness between software engineers and grad students.

(i am not sure what you mean about confidence to buy medicine. though i struggle financially, i feel like it would be disingenuous to claim that i cannot confidently buy medicine. but perhaps it is not worth getting into)

@imyxh I'm making a personal reference with medicine there, whether I continue to personally be rich or not in the "have my basic needs met at this current moment" sense depends very heavily on whether my insurance provider considers transition care to be covered or not, for example.

@xgranade i guess what i'm saying is that i do not believe a meaningful amount of class consciousness can be shared between labor-class millionaires and the portion of the working class that cannot afford to own property. the metric space that the notion of financial similarity exists in is just so starkly different between the minds of those in the former category and those in the latter. and in the minds of the latter, your point about emergencies relates more to small transition probabilities between classes rather than any serious notion of similarity at current time.

put another way, you cannot honestly expect someone who lives paycheck to paycheck to think a millionaire is more similar to them than to a billionaire. so it is impossible to have a shared sense of class consciousness between the paycheck-to-paycheck and the millionaire.

@noracodes @spinach @datarama @xgranade average total compensation rate for an engineer is likely around 150k because there’s a lot of people in mid-col areas working for companies that simply don’t pay that much

@imyxh @xgranade I used to think that, and that's wrong. Granted, I'm no millionaire, especially not in USD, but I have a salary that is so high that many people in the area would go to great lengths and great risks to earn. I've been on the giving and the receiving end of envy regarding the pay, so I understand it.

At some point, I realized that trying to prove the same classness would look like rich crying. So now I act the part. Sure, I make enough that I can afford many conveniences and no monthly financial horror. I don't flex with it, though. Most conveniences I use are restaurants and deliveries - which compensate for horrible mental health. I help friends and acquaintances when in financial need. I appreciate very greatly all effort towards me from other people and people working in service industry. I try to leave tips.

My only wish is that I'd give out money more freely, and donate to people more often. And donate to strangers on the internet. This is something I experience a ton of friction with - maybe some ambient financial anxiety really interferes with it.

As an addendum, let me emphasize: if someone is making 10^{5.5} dollars per year, they're rich. My point is that economic disparity is so incredibly bad in the US that being "rich" doesn't mean one has anything meaningfully in common with "owner-class rich" in terms of political power *or* security with respect to having basic needs met. It is a mistake for someone who is rich to think that it is not in their best interest to show solidarity with other laborers.

@xgranade The issue I always have with this discussion is that the people making 100 000 - 300 000 dollars per year (myself included) don't actually meaningfully engage with the material problems of the far less fortunate people, presumably in the same class as them, that do not. People simply stop at "we are all part of the same class" without engaging with the basic reality that making that much money unlocks a great deal of privilege:

1) One month of my salary would be a debt-destroying, life-stabilizing, unfathomable amount for many people.

2) Jobs which offer this much money are not only privileged due to money, but due to being much less precarious. Some people here may say "ah but I'm at risk of layoffs all the time" but being laid off from a full-time, professional, 9-5 job with benefits is not the same as working 3 jobs with no benefits and variable hours.

3) People making this salary have a greater opportunity to put money into investments and retirement savings. As a basic example, people in Canada have the opportunity to open a Registered Retirement Savings Account (this is a tax-free savings account you contribute your own money to, not a pension). Every one of my professional friends has one, but across Canadian society, the participation rate in this contribution program has hovered at 30% for years.

4) People living in high-cost-of-living areas who make closer to that 300 000 dollar income say that a large part of their income is spent on essentials such as housing, so really the income does not stretch that far. But the natural next question to ask is: What are the people who don't even make close to 300 000 in your city doing for housing? (The answer, often, is that they can't live in your city.)

5) It is much, much easier for people making this amount to become a part of the owner class, by accumulating the capital required to do so.

6) The sense of alienation when someone is talking about engaging in an experience or purchase that you could never afford, as if it's a normal thing, is indescribable. I always come back to this article from an organizer describing very frankly her experience working with well-meaning people who are much more economically privileged than her: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/jun/08/burnout-activism-working-class-organising-with-middle-class-comrades

Without acknowledging this, you end with up with political movements that are vaguely leftist but that are dominated by people who are far more privileged than the people they purport to serve, not least because only certain people have the time and capital to politically participate in the first place.

@noracodes @spinach @datarama @xgranade I was waffling a bit on if I should mark 150k as for senior engineers, but I guess it’s hard estimating the summary statistics of this trimodal distribution.

actually, no. four distributions.

There’s four different distributions for non-managerial “tech” roles:
- as much as other white collar employers at the company
- a premium over other white collar employees
- an entirely different scale versus other white collar employees
- an entirely different scale versus other tech employees

respectively: “in house software development plus IT at school district or small to mid sized company”, “software development at mid to large sized company”, “software development at tech company”, and “shook zuck’s hand for AI money”

@kouhai @noracodes @spinach @datarama @xgranade related: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/

There's a massive difference between owning one home, the home you live in, that could burn down and leave you homeless, that you need to work to afford maintenance and utilities and taxes on, and being so incredibly rich that you own a city block that you can charge rent on.

They're both rich, but they're not the same.

One more addendum: my point isn't that people should be nicer to folks at the own-a-home / have-retirements end of rich, it's that folks who have access to roughly $1M of assets (which again, includes one house in high cost-of-living areas) should stop acting like they're so fucking special that they don't need unions, or can betray fellow laborers with AI.

Being a rich laborer doesn't mean you're not a laborer, nor that fucking over other laborers is a good idea.

Capital owners in tech have very successfully sold rich laborers on the idea that they should act and vote more like bosses than like laborers, and seldom have I seen this idea play out in a more heartless manner than watching techbros talk about AI. Owning a home makes you well off, but it doesn't mean that the same people using AI to displace and devalue all other kinds of intellectual labor won't also come for you.

Tech workers, even the very well-off ones, need to understand class.

One more addendum: my point isn't that people should be nicer to folks at the own-a-home / have-retirements end of rich, it's that folks who have access to roughly $1M of assets (which again, includes one house in high cost-of-living areas) should stop acting like they're so fucking special that they don't need unions, or can betray fellow laborers with AI.

Being a rich laborer doesn't mean you're not a laborer, nor that fucking over other laborers is a good idea.

Capital owners in tech have very successfully sold rich laborers on the idea that they should act and vote more like bosses than like laborers, and seldom have I seen this idea play out in a more heartless manner than watching techbros talk about AI. Owning a home makes you well off, but it doesn't mean that the same people using AI to displace and devalue all other kinds of intellectual labor won't also come for you.

Tech workers, even the very well-off ones, need to understand class.

Capital owners in tech have very successfully sold rich laborers on the idea that they should act and vote more like bosses than like laborers, and seldom have I seen this idea play out in a more heartless manner than watching techbros talk about AI. Owning a home makes you well off, but it doesn't mean that the same people using AI to displace and devalue all other kinds of intellectual labor won't also come for you.

Tech workers, even the very well-off ones, need to understand class.

@xgranade Considering how much recent efforts are explicitly trying to fuck over the "Knowledge Work" sector (which is where programmers find themselves), they would do well to learn fast, because if they keep pretending they're in the upper class, they're gonna have a very rough next few years of rapidly worsening exploitation and diminished value in the labour market.