@datarama @xgranade My last three years of working had my total comp between $400K and $500K, mostly due to the stock component. Flat salary was low $200s. Bonus added a chunk, and stock made up the rest. My employer was trying to compete with the top dogs and paid like it, with the effect that I was surrounded by people who spent a lot of time in companies 10x our size and downsized to a mere 1000-programmer place to be more agile.

Comp like that was the top tier of the tech class-system. I spent most of my career much closer to the bottom, where total comp is more like $150K. Getting into the half-million comp companies is *extremely* hard, and I only managed it because my company got bought.

@sysadmin1138 @xgranade $150K is still considerably more than I make, and I'm a senior software developer with 20 YoE.

@datarama @xgranade Yes, the US tech labor-market is highly distorted. Ex-employer was actively trying to shift their tech workforce OUT of the US to make their costs easier. A friend moved to the UK to follow his wife and a professorship she got, and saw a 65% pay cut.

@datarama A tool like https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Stripe%2CBox%2CDropbox with location set to US will give you an idea.

@sysadmin1138 That is simply wild to me. Some of those positions have higher *starting* pay than what I know experienced staff- and principal-level engineers or architects make.

It's sort of hard to compare living expenses where I live to the US. We pay very high taxes, but there are also entire classes of economic worries we simply don't have to consider (socialized healthcare and education does that).

My pay is comfortably middle-class here, but I don't think I'd generally be considered "wealthy". I said I feel rich - part of that is that I live alone in a small (but very nice) apartment in a walkable city, don't own a car and use public transit when I need to go further than I can walk, which means my "ambient" living expenses are lower than someone who lives in a large house and who has to drive everywhere. I guess I define "feeling rich" as "not having to worry about money day-to-day".

(I spent most of my youth below the relative poverty line, though, so I probably also have an odd perspective on what "rich" is.)

@datarama $300k total compensation isn't too rare... it's about 10^5.5, so I think of that as mid?

@spinach @datarama @xgranade Yeah, seconded. It's still a lot of money but engineers in Chicago aren't making $300k lmao

@datarama @xgranade do also keep in mind that the area of the US makes a big difference in salary for most US software developers. i am in the midwest and the salaries here are closer to the $100,000 to $175,000 range. areas that have larger salary averages are typically much more expensive to live in due to housing prices being artificially inflated (bay area, seattle, etc.) so the larger salary typically mostly vaporizes due to housing costs

@noracodes @spinach @datarama @xgranade in Boston, you won’t make the Good Rates despite the high col

it’s extremely “col adjustment is what we say it is, not what it actually should be”

I think the other piece of this that comes to mind for me is that, by and large, software developers as a culture lack class consciousness.

If you're pulling down a mid six-figure tech salary, you're rich *and* you have more in common with someone in homelessness levels of crushing poverty than you do Jeff Bezos. You're the kind of rich that can own a house, not the kind that national governments consider to be too big to fail.

☭. evie (@vie@hachyderm.io)

I think it's interesting how software engineers are (among?) the most eager working class group to replace themselves with LLMs. It's interesting because LLMs do a worse job than us, we lose ability/skill to do our job the more we use it, lose our jobs, produce worse software, are less satisfied with our work, etc. Yet so many of my peers seem to be super excited about and advocate for it, while other working class groups at least detest LLMs if not even consider organising themselves to protect their trade/jobs from LLMs. Are we becoming the cops (read as: class traitors) of this techno-fascist dystopia?

Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)

@xgranade whether this is true depends on which metric you are using when you say "more in common". it seems the metric you have chosen is one related more to abstract notions of power and what one can get away with as opposed to how much one's basic needs are being met. i find this choice of metric in itself to be a compelling counterpoint.

@imyxh I think I made that clear by saying my comment was about class consciousness? Even in terms of basic needs, though, a labor-class millionaire is one bad emergency away from having absolutely no basic needs met, while there's no world in which that's true for owner-class billionaires.

So yeah, a lot of folks in tech believe the lie, think of themselves as owner-class instead of labor-class. A lot of shitty, shitty politics follow from that core untruth. Not all, not being reductive here, but a lot.

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.

I'm saying that *even if you are rich*, you almost certainly need a union, and you damn well ought to be fighting for labor rights. That you may not be rich in the future, and you damn well should be fighting against oppressive poverty. That wage stagnation may soon leave you unable to afford groceries, especially in the climate crisis. That all the above is true even if you don't have a shred of empathy, and only gets more true if you give a flying fuck about other people.

I'm saying that *even if you are rich*, you almost certainly need a union, and you damn well ought to be fighting for labor rights. That you may not be rich in the future, and you damn well should be fighting against oppressive poverty. That wage stagnation may soon leave you unable to afford groceries, especially in the climate crisis. That all the above is true even if you don't have a shred of empathy, and only gets more true if you give a flying fuck about other people.

@imyxh I think I made that clear by saying my comment was about class consciousness? Even in terms of basic needs, though, a labor-class millionaire is one bad emergency away from having absolutely no basic needs met, while there's no world in which that's true for owner-class billionaires.

@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.

@imyxh And to be sure, I am absolutely not saying that someone with immense amount of economic privilege is anything other privileged. What I'm saying is that it's a mistake for said privileged rich person to think that they're somehow no longer a laborer or sensitive to attacks on labor. The best reason to care about people in poverty is that no one should live in poverty, humans deserve better. The second best is that having one's basic needs met *now* doesn't guarantee they will be met later.

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.