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Consider my friend who did as he was told but sadly in his case that was to become one of the very best dancers in his time. Dancing doesn't pay. He now works 10 hour shifts as a Chef and just about gets by to provide for his family. Conversely I put an equal amount of effort in teaching myself how to code and can pull in over four times the salary he earns with slightly less effort and when I get home my body doesn't feel fatigued. So "hahahahaha", he chose wrong and I chose right? Right? I was just lucky that the money coincided with my interest in tech.

Damn straight I feel guilty and what makes me mad is when people claim its about effort and hard work. Sure that's definitely part of the equasion but you can work twice as hard and put in twice as much effort and it doesn't mean a damn if you didn't back the "right" industry horse. Save a thought for those that chose different yet still totally as valid fields like nursing or teaching and appreciate the benefit that tech has "unfairly" brought you. Next time you're up late and working super hard just remember you're not literally cleaning up shit and piss for 1/4 of the money.

> it doesn't mean a damn if you didn't back the "right" industry horse

Was your friend bamboozled into thinking that he could earn $250k/yr as a dancer? Teaching is one thing - I think most people would like to pay (good) teachers more. Nurses are capable of making quite a bit of money between base salary and overtime, especially at higher levels of education and specialization. Despite what the folks writing VC-funded CRUD apps here would like to think, programming probably has one of the lowest effort-to-payroll ratios around. Most people work harder than us for less money. Part of that's luck but part of it is the market. And part of it is hard work, effort, and hustle.

I've worked sanitation jobs before. They suck. They pay next to nothing. But they also require next to nothing aside from the willingness to do the work. They may pay "1/4 of the money" but they require much less than 1/4 of the skill, education, or experience.

> Was your friend bamboozled into thinking that he could earn $250k/yr as a dancer?

Its more the old meritocracy adage. "Work hard and you'll be comfortable". Its more than that. Sure he could have made it dancing but not JUST dancing, if he'd gone for more a PR and choreography route, if he'd considered effectively wasting his training on doing something easy like being a backing dancer to a pop star. However all of this is very much "create a successful startup" level than "be a code monkey level". To succeed as a dancer as much as a programmer you really have to go above and beyond.

I have worked sanitation before too. Honest work though.

He was probably told to follow his passion. Probably not good advice.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CVEuPmVAb8o

> Part of that's luck but part of it is the market.

I think a lot of that is the market.

> I think most people would like to pay (good) teachers more

In that case you're entirely unfamiliar with American conservative rhetoric and policy.

As an American conservative I would think I'm somewhat familiar with it. I'd love to pay good teachers more. I'd love to fire the bad ones. I'd love for good teachers to be able to earn more than bad ones, even if the good teachers have been there for less time! Imagine the horror of suggesting to a state teacher's union that someone there 10 years should make more money than someone there for 15.

Dancing does pay... if you're good enough. Basketball doesn't pay either unless your good enough and personally I don't think Lebron James or MJ should feel guilty about it. Lucky? Sure.

And back to your dancer friend, is he unhappy? If he looked at his risks, potential salaries, and happiness and chose to be a chef and amateur dancer, isn't that ok too?

I know many people who chose jobs that aren't their passion (hell, my passion is fishing and we know that doesn't pay). Instead I work a job that I enjoy while making enough money to provide for my family and my hobbies on the side. No, I don't feel guilty. If your passion coincides with a profession that makes $$ consider yourself fortunate.

> when people claim its about effort and hard work.

it's not just about effort and hard work. there are a lot of other factors, and one of those factors is his decision (for better or worse) to become a dancer vs. a doctor or lawyer or engineer. he's an adult and made his choice. we as a society cannot afford to subsidize everyone's "dream" of being an artist. someone has to actually do the work of moving us forward and keeping the lights on.

So while the ultra-rich corrupt democracy and amass ever more power, with increasing numbers of people vulnerable to their every whim, the people who work for a merely comfortable living should feel guilty?

Why this focus on guilt? Are we not allowed to be angry, as long as we still have some shred of comfort in out lives?

It's not about opposing guilt to anger. It's about pointing out that many of the public policies which most increase inequality are sops thrown by the very top to the broad class of well-off salaried workers immediately below them. Read the fine article: it's talking about things like restrictive zoning laws, 529 college-savings plans, and the mortgage-interest tax break. These are state subsidies for the well-off.

(Hell, my wife's parents saved up a 529 plan, and then she went to a state school on a full scholarship. Now we're apparently allowed to spend the 529 money to put a down payment on a house as a young couple, without any tax penalty. How is this allowed!?)

The question isn't, "Should people on HN feel guilty?". It's, "should people on HN receive a state subsidy for being fortunate?". Should we first make a nice living in tech, and then have the government write us extra little checks for all the ways we can pass our class down to our children?

> (Hell, my wife's parents saved up a 529 plan, and then she went to a state school on a full scholarship. Now we're apparently allowed to spend the 529 money to put a down payment on a house as a young couple, without any tax penalty. How is this allowed!?)

I'm not sure it is allowed. There must be some other transaction happening to make this without penalty. [1]

Also, why is everyone on this thread [not you] speaking of a 529 as if it's some elite 1% benefit? It's open to anyone. Most states have a $25 minimum, a lot of states have no minimum contribution at all [2].

[1]http://www.montereyherald.com/article/ZZ/20111006/NEWS/11100...

[2]http://www.savingforcollege.com/compare_529_plans/?plan_ques...

Edit: after some more research, it sounds like it may have been rolled over into an IRA for use with a first-time homebuyer exemption. See (http://finance.zacks.com/convert-529-ira-10479.html) under "Penalty Exceptions".

>The question isn't, "Should people on HN feel guilty?". It's, "should people on HN receive a state subsidy for being fortunate?"

The feelings of instilling guilt goes hand-in-hand with convincing the intended audience that they got to their position because of fortune instead of hard work. (The chain of thinking is then: your hard work didn't get you to the position of taking the mortgage deduction; instead it was your luck that did it.)

The writer wants workers with 100k salaries to vote for higher taxes on themselves by supporting politicians that promise to remove mortgage deductions and 529 education savings plans. In other words, he has to convince HN programmers making 100k that they are in fact, oppressing the low-income class. (E.g. Those tax deductions for home & college are subverting meritocracy and you should _feel bad_ for taking advantage of them.)

Do you think the writer's style of rhetoric was effective at persuasion? Or was he only effective at getting people who already agreed with him to nod in affirmation?

Nobody's talking about how you got into your position. We're talking about whether the government should send you free money for a position you've already got.

>Nobody's talking about how you got into your position.

Yes, the author did "talk about it" when he contends that people got that 100k jobs because of "luck" and "good fortune" instead of meritocracy. The author is throwing that premise-as-fact into the reader's face. The author has overlooked the fact that the reader must agree with that "luck" premise as a precondition of agreeing with the author's policy changes.

>We're talking about whether the government should send you free money for a position you've already got.

Ok, don't just write that sentence as some abstract credo. What does that mean in terms of concrete policy? Let's play that scenario out. That's what I tried to do with my last comment.

Are we wanting $100k job earners to vote for raising taxes on themselves via abolishment of mortgage and 529 tax deductions? Yes?

If so, you think his arguments persuasive to those who don't think those deductions were morally wrong? Did he successfully convince them that they are oppressing the low-income class?

>Are we wanting $100k job earners to vote for raising taxes on themselves via abolishment of mortgage and 529 tax deductions? Yes?

Yes, and I'd say we have pragmatic reasons to do so: the money for nice things has to come from somewhere. How is the subway system or Medicare supposed to run without tax money? If you make $100k and own a house, but have kids, where are your kids supposed to get affordable housing (and a rung onto the property ladder) of their own, without healthy pro-density zoning?

"The feelings of instilling guilt goes hand-in-hand with convincing the intended audience that they got to their position because of fortune instead of hard work."

People shouldn't feel guilty for the advantages their parents and ancestors worked hard to secure for them.

Sorry, my conjunction made that unclear.

The "guilt" is not about what their parents gave them; it's about making people feel guilt for taking the home & education tax deductions. (Although those are legal deductions, the writer wants to convince 100k earners that they are morally wrong for meritocracy.)

> Why this focus on guilt? Are we not allowed to be angry, as long as we still have some shred of comfort in out lives?

It's a manipulation tactic designed to force you to support the political aims of certain factions. While I do support the working class and poor, I, at least, decline to be manipulated.

It's a foolish tactic anyway; hammering the general public on guilt and privilege instead of focusing on sympathy and justice simply breeds resentment and will result in them silently sabotaging your agenda.

I think the point is that it's a bit of mental gymnastics to rail against "the rich" when you're a senior developer at Netflix making 10x the median household income.

cause I know the tech industry is "bubbly". Lot of people working in tech don't quite grok how tough it is for others to get by. Lets face it, while we're high enough to see the "real money" we're still a lot higher than everyone else salary and job security wise.

What if programmers were a dime a dozen and highly trained social care was where the lucra was at?

Yes, a bit.

I learned how wealthy, privileged, and protected even 100k is when we pulled our kids from a Catholic elementary school and moved them to an integrated urban magnet school (median income $35k). Suddenly we had some classmates who couldn't properly afford food, school clothes, and field trips. Not just one or two families, but many nice, hard-working families with smart kids. Just -- wow -- middle-class us -- we were suddenly rich, and I'd never really known it before.

My eldest will perpetuate her privilege and attend an Ivy in the fall. Her classmates, with exactly the same talent, education, hard work, and academic achievement will not, despite the availability of financial aid. Their families just didn't know how to micro-manage the application process, they couldn't afford extra-curricular enrichment, and some had other issues at home like immigration status or family health problems. Edit: and legacy preference; I am an alumn.

While I don't think it's malicious intent that "keeps low-income people from achieving what we've accomplished," there are definitely structural elements that do. I'm sure the existing system of financial games, housing, zoning, and education could be rearranged to help them much more.

Guilt is mentioned exactly once in the article: "At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty." I think that's rather overstating it - some people, mostly traditional aristos, feel a sense of noblesse oblige, but they're only a small proportion of the rich population.

I don't think framing it in terms of guilt is helpful, nor is trying to construct privilege as something that people should be ashamed of. It just makes people very defensive. What is better is for people to be aware of what advantages they had that other people did not, especially when they're telling other people what they should do or saying that everyone could get to their level if only they worked hard enough - hard work is not sufficient, avoidance of obstacles is also necessary.

(Private education is tax-deductible in the US? Blimey. The UK setup is slightly different - private schools are usually structured as non-profit educational charities, with tax advantages, and even that is grudgingly accepted due to the age and character of the schools.)

Did you have a computer at home as a child? That's a huge advantage that was outwith your control.

Private education is not generally tax-deductible in the US (e.g., private high school). 529 funds can be used for post-secondary education, but even then it's only the gains on the account that are exempt from tax if used for education.

> Richard Reeves says you should feel guilty? Do you feel guilty?

Close: I feel privileged. I'm a man, Eurasian ethnicity (that is: can pass for "white"), have two sisters, one of which has an "exotic" first name. And yes, I see the system being "rigged" in my favour all the time, related to the things I mentioned, and the unfairness of it all does piss me off.

Yes I feel rich. I no longer have to worry whether I can pay bills at the end of each month, despite making discretionary purchases without a pre-planned budget.

Yes I am lucky. Lucky to be both to parents who valued education, competency, and responsibility, knew how to instill those values in me, and had the capability to pull the right strings to see me through to a successful adulthood.

Crikey, what a strawman. The article isn't about making individuals feel guilty. It's about what it says on the tin: stop pretending you're not rich.

The median household income in California is $64k; across the US as a whole it's $52k. Half of all households are below these figures. If you're earning six figures, you are rich. It doesn't matter where you live, or what you spend your money on, you are rich. You're earning a minimum of 50% more than the median household income in a wealthy state. "Yeah, but my rent is high!"... well, go and see how the poor people live. Your rent may be high, but that's because you choose to live somewhere nice.

The article isn't about trying to make people feel guilty, it's about trying to pierce this bubble that the US upper middle class has (and HN has it in spades) that they're hard done by and kinda poor.

The article's conclusion is all about guilt and morality. Says so in the closing paragraphs.

It's about morality, but it's not about guilt. You don't have to feel guilty to break your own sense of entitlement. The whole theme of the article is 'stop pretending you're not rich', not 'you're rich and should feel guilty about it'.

>The whole theme of the article is 'stop pretending you're not rich', not 'you're rich and should feel guilty about it'.

The "stop pretending" is certainly the title but it's not the whole theme. He covers several themes. The author also wrote:

>The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.

In other words, if Americans had the right moral sense, they'd feel guilty about it too.

The theme for "pretending" is more about awareness if where six figures fits in the percentiles. Maybe people making $100k don't know or don't admit that such an income is in the top 17%. Yes, it's more than 83% others make so he advises, "don't pretend you're not rich."

The other theme is guilt and morals which the author is trying to convey to readers via claims of "luck", "good fortune", and "myth of meritocracy". This line of argument is orthogonal to the "stop pretending" theme.

At least 2 different themes with 2 different sets of supporting arguments in that blog post.

He's not trying to make people feel guilty, he's trying to make them admit some truths about the system - because until that happens, it can't be fixed. Everyone kicking back in these comments about 'being shamed' is utterly missing the point, and the 'guilt' line is a throwaway comment meaning that the upper class in England are aware of the issue, not that their emotional state is his desired target state for wealthy people to live in.

It's explicitly stated in the conclusion: For Americans to solve the problem of their deepening class divisions, we will have to start by admitting their existence and our complicity in maintaining them. The morals the author is interested in isn't "you should feel guilty", but "we need to fix this in order to even start helping the other four quintiles".

Not to mention that you're misrepresenting what he's saying, framing it as 'claims of luck', when his literal words are "in part the result of good fortune" (my emphasis). He's mirroring the same kind of thing that Warren Buffett says, yet people on HN don't complain about being guilted by Buffett's utterances.

The author isn't trying to make the reader feel guilty in that article; if the reader does feel guilty or shamed in reading it, then perhaps they're hiding something from themself? I mean, there's hard evidence right in this thread, where you see someone on $300k honestly arguing that someone on $30k is better off because they pay less income tax by percentage (!?!?). That takes a bizarre level of self-delusion.

Do I feel like the game is rigged to benefit me? Yes, to a certain (and meaningful) extent I do. I don't feel personally guilty about making decisions that are in my own best interests when the alternative would be to simply inconvenience me with no upside to any other party. I do feel some collective guilt in that we cannot get our country to do right by those coming from less advantaged positions.

Yes, to some extent.

I don't have kids yet, but when I do I will send them to public school. I had the massive advantage of being able to afford buying a house in a good school district. The money spent on housing tends to be directly proportional to the quality of schooling, which has a massive impact on income mobility.

Even if you discount better teachers and the like, going to a school where everyone's parents are invested in their kids' futures will produce very different outcomes from where parents aren't there (working multiple jobs, in jail, whatever).

So even though I am not specifically putting a boot on someone's head to keep them down, I am a willing participant in a system that effectively does that.

I'm an HN reader who does not earn $100k+.

In my view, very, very, very few programmers really deserve more than about $200k at most.

If you're earning $100k+ and you don't have children or extenuating circumstances such as disabilities that increase your non-discretionary expenditure, you're absolutely rich, and if you don't feel rich then you're either spending your money wrong or your benchmarks of wealth are waaaay off.

Outside the US, they won't. Working at Daimler for 10 years, you don't clear 80000 EUR if not moving in a managerial tier, and even then you'll have to move quite far up. (Starting nowadays, you'll have 50000 EUR starting salary as a junior developer.) And this is before taxes; even with 2 children, I'll pay upwards of 40 percent income tax in addition to 19 percent mandatory health insurance.

SV is a fantasy world.

It doesn't work like that. You don't get what you're 'worth'. You get what you negotiate. Its a market, your skills are for sale, you have to make a good deal.

Yep. I know how the market works. something something ~capitalism~

"In my view, very, very, very few programmers really deserve more than about $200k at most."

Why?

I can't say I have a particularly well reasoned argument for saying that. It's just my moral intuition. I definitely can say that I don't think that a person's wealth and well-being should be determined by "value to the market".

(FWIW I also come from a public service town, where very intelligent and talented people lead decently upper-middle-class lives, but salaries top out well below where one could get in the private sector.)

Yes, I look at the people I grew up around in a poor-to-working class neighborhood in Chicago and I feel guilty that most of them didn't get the same opportunity I did to do better. I was bused to better schools because of my test scores, I had a family that really cared and was relatively stable so while we didn't have a ton of money we had that. It's definitely not fair and not a product of anything I did other than being lucky to be born intelligent and into a caring stable family.

I'm not sure whether I should be blamed for other people not moving up the ladder, I don't have kids or a house so some of his critiques don't apply to me. But it does feel like in many cases the upper middle class stands in the way of progressive policy.

Do I feel rich? No. Do I feel the system is rigged? Absolutely not and I'm sick and tired of people who make POOR decisions complaining about other people who work hard and make good decisions .. stop whining, and take some responsibility for your decisions. No, you can't have everything you want and no, the world is not fair.

I consider myself rich. I feel guilty about it. I make far less than many on HN (but live in an area which is much more affordable than SF). By the article's definition we are not in the top 20%, but given a cost of living adjustment I'd put us near it.

Barring a catastrophe striking myself or my wife and permanently impeding our ability to work (and even potentially including a catastrophe striking only one of us) I will never have a concern about paying for food, shelter, transportation, clothing, education for my daughter, entertainment, or retirement. Nothing of any real import.

I think the most serious plausible risk would be a drawn out medical disaster occuring to one or both of us, with exotic and expensive treatments and overwhelming hospice costs. Our society deems it fit to bankrupt families in this state. The truly rich are the only ones really exempted from this potential outcome.

We have a house. It's about half paid off.

Extremely high cost luxury items (such as exotic luxury cars) are either out of our grasp or ruled to be within our grasp but miserable investments, and are not seriously considered. As an example, our primary vehicle is 8 years old, and it cost ~$20k when new. We have a "spare" vehicle which is much older but is still reliable (I commute by bike, but having a "spare" vehicle is useful for emergencies or for very bad weather (when my daughter needs transportation and cannot ride with me safely)).

We keep enough money in the bank to buy a similar new vehicle with cash if this one fails, or to pay for major problems with the house. If both occur at the same time, we would need to take out a home equity loan or an auto loan.

We donate to charity but I feel guilty about how little. We donate more since the election.

We still own luxury items. I have a $300 pair of shoes. My wife owns nice clothing. I own a $1500 bicycle (and have several more less valuable bicycles which I enjoy working on and tinkering with). I own ~$3000 worth of camera equipment.

We shop at a co-op market, we buy local organic food. We eat out at restaurants several times a week.

We travel every year, sometimes abroad.

We never have to work on weekends or holidays.

Our parents are not rich. We "earned" all of this on our own. Through, mostly, simply good fortune at being in the right place in the right time in the right generation.

What is rich? What point is there in having more than this? How would it benefit society for us to have more than this? I suppose we could work less, but we both enjoy our work.

> Do programmers and sysadmins feel like getting the job and six-figure salary was from luck or the result of a rigged system?

I'm white and male and relatively young still, so to some extent, yes, it is rigged in my favor.

>I'm white [...] rigged in my favor

Ok, how do Asians fit in that narrative? They suffer reverse-discrimination[1] and yet they are over-represented in high-paying technology jobs. Was the system "rigged" for them as well?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=asians+reverse+discriminatio...