In Silicon Valley wages are down for everyone but the top 10 percent | Hacker News Reader

In Silicon Valley wages are down for everyone but the top 10 percent

cnbc.com

42 pointsSmkyMt23 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212980

Given that this was last talked about 50 days ago, and I have seen things explicitly reposted that stayed up. What is the guideline on when things become dupes?

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

On HN a story counts as a dupe if it has had significant attention in the last year or so. If it hasn't, a small number of reposts is ok.

In addition to dang's reply, see this link for more explanation:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20dupe%20detector%20po...

They don't make it clear in the article, but presumably the top 10 percent of salaries includes most/all developers?

It's not really surprising that the heart of the tech industry (which drives a large part of the modern economy) would have very wide disparity between service workers and highly skilled specialists working for companies making massive amount of revenue.

My takeaway is that the people in the middle get screwed the most (in terms of wages vs. inflation). The poor are still poor, the rich are still rich, and the middle gets thinner as those within the group are either pushed towards the poor side (higher probability) or rich side (lower probability).

I'm not an economist, so feel free to enlighten me further on my speculations.

I believe you're correct. Also, we've been churning out CS graduates and coding bootcamp graduates like crazy, so the bottom of the labor market is the only place where supply may meet or exceed demand, while the top (highly experienced) is still a pretty thin pool (relatively speaking)

And many of those bootcamp graduates will be a) drowning in work b) be ill equipped to get the skills to join the top 10% where most will be need to be credentialed. That bootcamp certificate is a Wage Slave License.

Can you define "credentialed" here?

Yes, the middle income bracket is shrinking. The lower income bracket is growing. Even outside of SV wages have stagnated in the lower tiers (since 1974 in varying degrees.)

(edit) I should add this is by percentage. A recent study says the percentages have stabilized for now.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american...

The article you linked shows that more people moved to the upper bracket than the lower (5% vs 4%).

In relative terms the earnings growth was even more dramatic -- the upper class grew 27% larger whereas the lower class only grew by 14%.

There are more people moving up than down.

Absolutely. The news isn’t all bad, and I think most reporting has focused on the decline of the middle, instead of the growth of the bottom.

It's important to note that these studies over time don't include the same people. The Silicon Valley wage earners from 1997 overlap with the today's population only slightly.

I think a more telling study would be on an individual basis. Someone earning X in Silicon Valley 20 years ago is earning Y today.

That'd be pretty misleading as well. A number of people became independently wealthy off stock options in the dot-com boom and now use that money to indulge in personally-fulfilling but not necessarily lucrative hobbies. (Examples: DNA Lounge and Rabbit's Foot Meadery are both run by Netscape alums, a few rug merchants in Palo Alto got rich off dot-com stock, I had a friend at Google who quit her job after 7 years at Adobe + Google to open a gym, I suspect a number of restaurants in the local downtowns are run by ex-tech engineers, and I stayed at a B&B up in Alaska that was run by a guy who saved all his money working in SV for 20 years and then sailed around the world, bought a couple warehouses in Seward, and turned them into a B&B + restaurant.)

Comparing newcomers today to newcomers 20 years ago, and seniors today to seniors 20 years ago makes more sense to me.

The referenced UCSC report doesn't seem to be cited or linked from TFA. A brief and the full report are both linked from here: https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/10/benner-tightrope.html

Only ~9% left to optimize!

Think of how much silicon valley could make once they get ride of those pesky programmers.

Mucking up their perfectly good business models with salaries.

One of the hardest problems technology companies face is how to convert salaried developers with benefits into gig economy workers they don't have to pay between keystrokes.

An IDE where "Refactor ..." is actually backed by a mechanical turk worker working for hits.

Of course, with the caveat that its adjusted for inflation. For example, in 1997, minimum wage in California was $5/hour, and in 2018 it's $10.50-$11/hour [0]. So, minimum wage workers are making over double in current dollars, which the article claims is a 1% decrease in real wages, which would be more accurately described as "flat", not "down".

[0] https://www.dir.ca.gov/iwc/MinimumWageHistory.htm

In the article they mention minimum wage and the fact that their decrease had been less than average. Middle class workers wages are down 14%

Most software developers really aren’t making that much. If you can’t make it into FANG companies or can’t be a founder, find a different career

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