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You're not losing your mind, same here. I think a lot - particularly on the younger side - have done almost nothing besides software in a serious way. A lot of people have no perspective on how hard life is for a really large chunk of this country. The "go away to southeast asia and live on a beach for 6 months to reset yourself" is the one that makes me feel most out of touch. If/when we have another crunch some people will have very rude wake up calls.

Thanks for the affirmation, the software community can be an isolating place for people living outside the main stream.

Just because other people may have it worse is absolutely no reason to stop striving for better.

I grew up in rural Oregon as well. (Outside of Roseburg) I made more than both of my parents combined with my first post college job at $65k/yr. (And I was severely underpaid) Now I make closer to $200k but without 2 $200k incomes it feels like poverty in the Bay area. I rent a 400sqft in-law unit and another person rents the 900sqft 1930's 2 bedroom house in the front. We both pay a lot for relatively meager living conditions. We live in a nicer area but it's very suburban. This property is worth close to $2m according to Zillow (and recent sales we have seen). It's not nice or updated or even a large lot (4k sqft).

$2,000,000 for a pretty small house and lot. There's a reason a lot of folks here are chasing money - it's the only way to have a quality of life and lifestyle similar to those outside the bay area.

You're not losing your mind. Your perspective is different, and it might perhaps change over time. From your description of your upbringing it sounds like we have/had a lot in common. I was raised by a single father who made $40k/year at best. I was able to get a "new" computer every 3 years from age 11 on, but that was about it. My clothes were old. My shoes didn't fit well. My school backpack was held together by safety pins. My car in high school was bought for $800 and was almost as old as I was.

My first job was for $75k - 80% more than my father was making at the time. Now I make more money than my entire family at their maximum earnings even adjusted for inflation. This doesn't impress me, give me any comfort or a sense of success.

The drive, for me, for a "fuck-you money" payout is this simple desire: "I don't want anyone to tell me what to do with my time."

I think we grew up in a similar level of a family and our first jobs were also quite similar. My first job was also for a big hardware chip maker for slightly less pay. (not in Silicon Valley) I felt rich and set for life.

I'll say though, the SF Bay Area has a way to make you feel poor. It's not even keeping up with the joneses type stuff with your software engineer peers. It's just normal living expenses. Six figures salaries don't feel rich unless you enter the "2"+ territory. $1xxk doesn't feel much more than the $60k first job outside of the bay I had in the mid-00s, even high $1xxk, especially with a family to raise. After years of living like that, it makes more sense that people want to maximize their earning potential.

The other day as a Gedankenexperiment, I took one of the "2+" numbers being thrown around and I did the math - taxes, mortgage/rent, etc. I could be wrong, but it really struck me ones real net income for the Bay Area ends up very similar to the person making half that much in the midwest (or wherever).

You're right on the money here. And I think an engineer can have a pretty solid, fulfilling, well-enough-paying career working for a whole string of failed startups!

The thing is that the rich-poor gap has grown considerably as well. In this era if you don't have at least millions you can hardly get themselves/their family a comfortable life/retirement in a metropolitan area. Nobody feels secure anymore and it's only understandable that everybody wants to pull in as much money as possible while they can. Some works such as Capitalism in the 21st Century talk about this but you should also have felt it yourself.

We are lucky. We live at a lucky time, when the thing we like to do is very lucrative. 30 years ago it was not like this for programmers, and maybe 30 years from now it will also not be like this.

I appreciate that you are satisfied with your income and that the desire for more irks you. However, I think one thing to consider is that capitalism always means that people are making money on top of the cost of your labour.

Maybe the capitalists took a huge risk of investing (employing) you and you feel grateful to leave more money to them. Maybe the capitalists do a lot of work for themselves too and are rewarded appropriately in equity.

But it's not uncommon that labour is just exploited.

>But it's not uncommon that labour is just exploited

This trope is total BS. It makes workers out to be idiots who are too naive to understand the situation. Of course people are making a profit off me. That's the entire point of employment, I give you labor, you give me a steady paycheck. If I don't like it, I can figure out how to give other's work and a steady paycheck then take the profit.

Thinking that somehow if all workers striked, formed unions or formed co-ops, suddenly the world would be "fair" is naive.

Humans are greedy.

It's in our brains to try to grab as many resources as possible. Socialism is far more opaque than capitalism because greed is chided and has to be hidden (!)

I'd much rather have people building new things, trying to grab as much wealth as possible than be stuck in a system where creativity and drive aren't rewarded. It's total game theory: If Joe doesn't care, he will do the least amount of work. If I can never make more than Joe, then I will do less work than Joe. It's all about minimizing cost (effort) and maximizing profit (money). Once you disconnect effort from money, the system sucks, which can be an argument for why workers deserve pay raises.

I notice that greedy people like to characterize all of humanity as greedy so they feel justified in being greedy.

I don't think I'm that greedy, I definitely ask for and have more than I actually need. I just built the assumption from the common pattern in why socialism has failed in the past ("All of us are equal, but some of us are more equal than the others")

The top of the pyramid in socialism always gets more therefore humans are greedy.

Also, it would make sense in my mind, from an evolutionary standpoint of why being greedy is actually a good trait. I'm not advocating that unchecked greed is great. I am advocating that understanding our brains is better, then we can check ourselves from that.