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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused. The title says "Silicon Valley Elites" but the article says "tech workers", then goes on to list Mark Zuckerberg and some Apple guy who's salary is apparently 50%(!) stock, as examples.

So who are these banks "courting" again? Elites or tech workers? Or just these two guys? It's hard to tell. Interesting news would be "Banks giving kickbacks to CEOs and VCs who throw them corporate business." This article seems to just be "Look! Some people are getting sweet deals on their mortgages."

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> some Apple guy who's salary is apparently 50%(!) stock, as examples

I don't see the surprise there. I'd wager most senior Google employees have around 50% comp in stock.

> most senior Google employees have around 50% comp in stock.

Far more pervasive than that. A buddy of mine just took a typical sys-admin position at AAPL and is paid 50% stock/equity. Same with an MBA I know working at AMZN.

Ok, we changed the title above to say "some tech workers", which seems accurate enough.

Oh my god. I just realized I've crossed over and become a HN title complainer. I need to take a break from HN for 24 hours.

I find it hilarious that the answer to this isn't obvious.

This is 2016. Tech workers are the American elites.

Did you think elites were still guys with a monacle sitting in a drawing room that overlooks a coal mine or something?

Is that so? Why would tech workers be considered elite?

> Tech workers are the American elites.

I don't have any congressmen on speeddial to get whatever I want passed through the next pork barrel bill in Congress, what am I doing wrong?

You aren't writing checks. Send a Congressman $1000 (that's really all it takes to get their attention) and you'll be amazed how responsive they will come. Senators are a little more expensive, but still reasonably priced at $2-5k. Presidential candidates are in the low five digits.

Tech workers probably want to put that $1,000 into their homes, or into their kid's savings, or pay down some of that student loan debt.

I'm a tech worker and I don't honestly see a near-term future where I would throw $2,000 at a senator to talk to them about, say, net neutrality. I've got all kinds of things I'm saving for! My boat isn't going to drain me of my earnings by itself!

Everyone needs to decide on their priorities in life. If you want political influence (or at least the illusion of political influence) you can have it for a pretty modest price.

If you want real political influence of the sort that will actually let you move the needle on something like net neutrality then you need to be writing much bigger checks. $1k will buy you half an hour on the phone will a congressman who will pretend to listen to you. But to actually influence policy you need budgets in the 6-7 digits because you have to repeat the process across many dozens of congressmen and senators.

> You aren't writing checks. Send a Congressman $1000 (that's really all it takes to get their attention) and you'll be amazed how responsive they will come. Senators are a little more expensive, but still reasonably priced at $2-5k. Presidential candidates are in the low five digits.

Except for the first, all of those numbers are (or state a range that includes) amounts that exceed the limit for a single donors campaign donations for a single election cycle to a single candidate.

Having to return your donation because accepting it will exceed the legal limit may get a candidate to notice you, but perhaps more as someone who they need to be careful around to avoid scandal than anything else.

You give the legal limit to the candidate directly, and the rest goes to their super-PAC.

You're not giving the max ($2700 for primary, $2700 for general) each election and gathering up a dozen people who give $1,000+ donations.

This would likely be enough to get one congresscritter to look your way, at least.

Yup. $2700 for a primary, $2700 for a general election. Now consider how much of the country could conceivably throw $5400 at something like that without significant sacrifice, and "elite" starts to make a lot more sense.

The elites in terms of expenditure-driven political influence are people whose expenditures far exceed the legal limit on direct donations (because they'll do that for more than one candidate in a cycle, plus giving money to entities like the party congressional/senate campaign committees, and the party national committees, and politically active interest groups, interest group PACs, and candidate- and issue-focused SuperPACs, and, in some cases, carefully structuring transactions to give goods and services directly to candidates and office holders while skirting bribery and corruption laws.)

I'm well aware, thank you. But if you max out your average Congressman and ask for a meeting, you get it. You will be invited to events--including ones that are not donation-expected for years after the fact, and your congressman will almost certainly know you by name, if not face.

This is not a great system, but many tech workers can get into that circle if it's something that matters to them.

>Tech workers are the American elites

Apparently I did not get the memo. </sarcasm>

> This is 2016. Tech workers are the American elites.

No, they aren't. The American elites aren't workers, they are capitalists. Tech workers are among the class of elite workers that have enough income that they can afford to make significant investments and tend to be in the petit bourgeoisie -- that is, in traditional terms of analysis of capitalist economic strata, the narrow middle class -- but "elite workers" are only elite among workers.

The actual American elites (as is true of all capitalist and most modern mixed economies) are the haut bourgeoisie, the capitalist class; those who derive the overwhelming majority of their support from capital which generates returns largely passively for the capitalist (usually, through the application of other people's rented labor.)

> Did you think elites were still guys with a monacle sitting in a drawing room that overlooks a coal mine or something?

No, but the elites are still the guys that have the same relationship to tech (and other) workers that those guys with monocles had to coal miners (and other workers.)

I think people have a weird distorted view of what a "tech worker" is then. Like watching medical dramas and thinking that's what being a doctor is like.

I'm a tech worker, and I can assure you I'm not an "American elite". I don't get white glove treatment at the bank, have a butler, chauffeur, or financial advisor. I schlep it 2 hours to work each morning and 2 hours back, and if I lose my job, I'm N paychecks away from ruin like everyone else. My "N" may be 5 where others may be 2, but most of us are in the same boat. Does that really sound elite to you?

I highly recommend soliciting the services of a fee only financial advisor. Or just read the book "Personal Finance for Dummies" cover to cover.

The new elites are in tech, but they're not the rank and file. Making even $250k/yr may be top-5% for income and give you breathing room to make a few investments, but it will never make you wealthy. That's lifetime earnings of about $10m before taxes, so you likely wouldn't get to fuck-you money ever, let alone with time to use it.

There's a very serious discontinuity somewhere around the $1m/year mark where you get to the point that you don't have to work for the rest of your life while you're still young. There's another huge difference between that and the guys worth $100m+ who can have whatever they want, including financing insane research and construction projects, not just the normal comfortable middle-class lifestyle, and never run out of money.

Putting those people in the same group as your average software engineer for socioeconomic purposes is ridiculous. Sure, I might have more in common with Zuckerberg than with a coal miner, but only just, and that's not saying much.

> it will never make you wealthy. That's lifetime earnings of about $10m before taxes

This thread has taught me that people in the valley or the HN echo chamber really sort of have no idea how most people live in this country, let alone around the world.

and you must have no idea how much it costs to live in the bay area. a dentist in arizona will have a higher net worth at retirement than a tech worker in the bay area.

> and you must have no idea how much it costs to live in the bay area

I live in New York City. I could probably grok the basic concept.

The average American household (no individual) income is $52,000 (2014).

You've got people on HN claiming that making 5x that makes them solidly middle class because they can't afford a home in one of the most expensive places in the world.

Exactly. The parent comment ignores the fact that in their scenario of "only" making $10MM in an entire career, they could spend as much as the average family for 20 years and have $9MM lying around in cash, plus interest. But, supposedly, not be wealthy.

Well, if you make $10MM at $250k/yr over 40 years in California, you're only taking home maybe 65% of that. And you're presumably paying rent. Let's be generous and call it $24,000/yr, and say that you do incredibly well at saving and manage to put together a down payment after 5 years, so after that only $5000/yr (wild ballparking, I haven't done the math since I'm so far from being a homeowner) goes to interest/taxes rather than your own equity.

At the end of 40 years, that puts you at $6.2M - a further 20% of which is tied up in housing equity - before any other expenses. That's a decent retirement, yes, but it's not rich in the way that the elites are rich. Not even close.

I think what you don't realize is that most people are, in traditional terms, working class (proletariat).

Relative to them, tech workers -- who are quite often in what is, in traditional terms, the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie) -- may seem like a narrow elite. This is an understandable perception, and there is a sense in which it is correct -- tech workers are elite workers.

But they aren't the elite within the country, and the gap between tech workers and the elite is much greater than the gap between the average worker and the average tech worker. The elite (the haut bourgeoisie) are not "workers" at all.

I don't see the contradiction between what I said and what you said. Most people in this country, let alone around the world, aren't wealthy. Most of the "middle class", as used in contemporary American political rhetoric, are poor. Just because tech employees aren't generally wondering where their next meal (or even next few rent checks) will come from doesn't mean they're wealthy.

The levels of income we're talking about for tech employees, especially in the SF area but also in most places in the US, will still force you to continue working for a salary for your entire adult life (until retirement age) or else eventually starve. You never get to the point where you can just quit. That's the distinction between us and Zuckerberg that comparing us to somebody making $50k doesn't expose: like them, we have to work and will probably never be anything more than comfortable with some luxuries. We're all proletariat - maybe bordering on petit bourgeoisie at the upper end, but still working for our money rather than having our money work for us.

Elites are the guys who make deals for a living. Investors, executives, traders, etc. The people who own the tech companies, the people who service the IPOs, the people who own the real estate we pay such ridiculous rents on, the CEOs and board members of our employers and the companies we buy stuff from.

Our pay is high, all things considered, but not nearly as high as law or medicine, and certainly not management. I'd say we are rising from the upper tier of clerical workers to the lower tier of educated professionals. That is "elite" compared to the average person, certainly, but not compared to the economy as a whole.

The term generally given to this strata is "upper middle class." Some resent calling it middle class at all, but nonetheless - there is a critical distinction between "owners of the means of production," "managers of the means of production," and "highly skilled operators of the means of production."

It reminds me of the saying "An alcoholic (the elite) are those that drink one more drink (make more money) than I do".

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