>In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy.
Uh... I think that's the wrong argument. The people making "high salaries" (let's say... >= $100k/year, base salary) at FAANG companies really are, de facto, petty bourgeois. They don't just get "stock options" that never materialize. They get annual bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars, plus stock options or RSUs that vest to create further paper wealth. In the Bay Area with its stupidly stratospheric housing prices, maybe we can talk about these people being "middle class" in the same way my parents are (ie: as white-collar employees making middling salaries). Maybe.
But really, just about anywhere outside the Bay Area, most of those high salary FAANG employees are building capital far faster than they lose money to living expenses, and provided they're willing to live cheaply and far away, a secure early retirement in middle-age is a strong possibility. Given some moderate but successful investments, they could even get truly rich.
Working class is when you convert labor into money into commodities. Owning class is when you convert money into commodities into money.
But what's correct to point out is that the vast majority of programmers, software engineers, and IT staff aren't high-salary FAANG workers. They take home a median income, in fact, of about ~$65k/year.