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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

While I generally agree with the sentiment there is no such thing as a labour shortage, only a pay shortage, money is not a panacea.

For one, people's expectations change. I couldn't count the number of times I've seen a Bay Area software engineer 4 years out of college genuinely believe they're justified in complaining about their lot in life because they can't afford a 5 bedroom house in Palo Alto, all the while being driven around and being fed for free by workers making $20 an hour who have to try and live in the same area.

Look at the obvious internal strife at places like Google over efforts like Maven and Dragonfly. If it was just money motivating them, would you see that? Would you see people who leave over it?

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It's the "Keeping up with the Joneses" problem, but nowadays the Joneses are flashing their material wealth on Instagram (and they don't tell you if it's real or faked).

E.g. this guy has pictures from yachts, but he's not enjoying it, he's working: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-lonely-life-of-a-yac...

They also dont flash the 90 days same as cash or similar agreement attached to it...

"I want a house." isn't exactly yacht envy. It's a standard expectation in most of the country. Having a high-paying job in an extremely high cost of living area makes the economics weird. You're not rich until you can save up a bunch of that money and escape.

> I couldn't count the number of times I've seen a Bay Area software engineer 4 years out of college genuinely believe they're justified in complaining about their lot in life

I don't believe you.

I believe that there are people like this saying they could probably demand more money, and also that they may be commenting on how ludicrously high housing costs are in the bay area, and how that makes it hard to afford to buy a house even on a very high nominal salary.

But I find that comments like this are usually exaggerating others' sense of entitlement. Certainly it's very common in the CS career subreddit that I moderate. And having grown up in the bay area and worked at Google in the bay area...I just haven't seen many, if any, devs this entitled-sounding. So no, I don't believe you've hit this mega-entitled doucheperson "more times than you can count".

A sense of entitlement about housing reflects expectations that are about 7 years out of date (i.e. that ownership of a decent home with a decent commute is reliably attainable through professional success). Not surprising that people are still upset about the freshly amended deal terms. When your 4-year SWE picked their college major, it would still have been a path to the kind of life his parents had.

People are getting driven around because it’s the frugal thing to do. Have you seen what parking costs?

It might be related to Maslow's hierarchy.

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