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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

I think that's the best description. Today with all the propaganda around 'open workspaces', white collar workers have been forced back into the lower class (in spite of getting higher salaries).

Your class is more related to your self-esteem than your income.

In one of the companies I worked for as a contractor, I had my own office and it felt great.

When I was younger, I briefly worked in a telemarketing call center for the equivalent of $20K per year. Then many years later (after I finished uni), I was earning $200K per year in a different company (as a software engineer in an open workspace).

The $200K workplace didn't boost my self-esteem much more than than the $20k workplace.

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> Today with all the propaganda around 'open workspaces', white collar workers have been forced back into the lower class.

This is the epitome of pampered engineer BS. You aren't lower class because you don't have a private office.

$200k/year and lower class? You can afford to buy your own private office for much less than that.

I agree that it sounds ludicrous to claim that one can be 'lower class' at $200k/year, however, I think there's a charitable way to read this position.

Perhaps their point is that autonomy is a better indicator of class than salary. Just like 'stupid is as stupid does,' 'class is as class does.'

Being able to afford your own office means nothing if you can't actually use it because you spend 8-10 hours a day trapped in an environment that you find degrading.

The barrier to class mobility in this case is mental. The engineer has traded autonomy for cash.

My own opinion is that one becomes upper class when they can choose not to work. If your living expenses are $20k/year and you make that from returns on passive investments, congratulations, you're a part of the leisure class.

If your expenses are $190k/year and you earn a salary of $200k/year you're a part of the lower/precariat class.

If your expenses are $190k/year and you earn a salary of $200k/year you are an upper-middle class person with poor judgement. Lifestyle inflation does not make someone lower class.

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." -- Micawber (from David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 1850)

Isn't it kind of interesting that normative respect for software engineers is so low that even when salaries are $80k to $150k on a team, that same team is going to be sitting in an open plan setting and talked down to by management?

It's funny because software developers are more kin to the 'real professions' like law when it comes to earnings potential: like lawyers, a software dev can simply make money by setting up his or her own shop with very* little capital investment beyond education.

Edit:

Now that I think about it, the loss of respect might come from the fact that software devs have a 'management' looking over their shoulders at all. In other 'true' professions, the ones who are liable to cut-costs, haze, or otherwise pour abuse on a professional would also be in the same profession. E.g. if you're a lawyer, you may work 100 hour weeks for the first 8 years, but you're doing so not because some pointy-haired MBA is telling you, but because X lawyer with prestige who owns the company is telling you to. So even though the outcome is the same, it may feel more okay because its coming from someone of your same class/category.

  coming from someone of your same class/category

I think you make a very good point here: it is coming from a colleague, someone who is on (more or less) the same track as you are, only a little ahead of you in terms of the career path.

> Isn't it kind of interesting that normative respect for software engineers is so low that even when salaries are $80k to $150k on a team, that same team is going to be sitting in an open plan setting and talked down to by management?

Nah, that's just how wage-labor works.

Oh I agree that is how it works. Though I still think it interesting.

Historically, there's been a push-pull between engineering and the professions. Engineering (artillery, civil, metal-working and the like) being seen as low class labour where as the professions (law/medicine/natural philosophy then science) was seen as high class work.

I once believed this was because engineering always had a physical outcome, where as professional work could be done as a pure though experiment (e.g. law) or had literal connotations of power of live (e.g. medicine).

But looking at computer science/engineering, I wonder if that's a good hypothesis. CS is still suffering from the same low-prestige status despite having billionaires rise from its ranks, and despite that it has no physical equivalent.

Being lower or higher class is not only a matter of money, but also and mainly a matter of social capital. People might not be rich, but they might use the wealth of their class peers - as long as they share their codes and culture. That's why having your own office is important. Because it brings you into another class through codes and culture. Same thing with owning a boat or a country house.

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