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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

If you were to ask my circle of friends and family, even bigcorp programmer money isn’t sufficient to feel secure due to future economic volatility. Especially if your goal is to make sure your kids get to live in the richer neighborhoods and go to the richer schools, and so on and so forth.

And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you’re in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds for your kids.

I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had FU money, which also means a few million in diversified assets other than my house. Especially in the US, where quality healthcare is a minimum $20k per year for a family in insurance premiums alone plus a few ten thousands in out of pocket costs.

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I talked about the dangers of value drift/cognitive dissonance upthread, and this is a prime example of what I'm talking about. It is very easy to say "I'll just work this job until I'm financially secure". But then you start hanging out with a bunch of highly paid people, and start to feel that you need "a few hundred thousand [dollars] in passive income" (which really means ~$7 million in assets, depending on what you mean by "few").

That is, from any objective viewpoint, absurd. Moreover, it's a recipe for talking yourself into an ever-extended stay in a situation that, fundamentally, doesn't comport with your values. I don't say this to attack the OP – I've seen the same process happen to good people, seen people feel "poor/underpaid" while making $200k.

Instead, my focus is on the other people. Pay attention to OP, and realize just how powerful an influence the right (wrong) "circle of friends and family" can be. Imo, you should think very carefully before spending your life around a circle that would cause you to think financial security requires $7 million.

As a bigcorp programmer, you should absolutely have enough income to be secure from any real discomfort.

You're right, you're not secure from all possible reductions in peak earnings. You may sacrifice some potential income and future wealth by switching jobs. There will always be richer neighbourhoods & schools, so that may mean risking a sacrifice in future lifestyle. But that's not the kind of risk that the article is talking about.

Most people can't leave their jobs because if they do so then they immediately risk not making rent, not feeding themselves/their families, or losing healthcare entirely. In practice, that means they really do have no choice: very few people will give up food for the greater good, and it's not reasonable to expect them to.

Successful programmers are not in that position though. You absolutely have a choice. The choice you're describing is between optimizing for peak wealth or trading a small part of that wealth for the greater good, at no substantial cost to your lifestyle. If greater personal wealth is always more valuable to you than any greater good then perhaps this doesn't feel like a choice either, but you're well past most people's line for reasonably ethical behaviour at that point.

Simply not true, at all. When supporting a family that comes first. Always.

A cursory evaluation is enough to dispel this myth. People do all sorts of destructive things to their families all the time. Let alone taking a slight hit to wealth in order to respect your morals.

I personally wouldn’t do it without talking things over with mine but if I felt strongly about leaving a job on ethical grounds I’m pretty sure my family would support that decision. You are after all just another member of the family that also needs support.

You're saying no matter how much money you have, 10x the average national income, 100x, 1000x, there's no way you would risk _any_ loss of income by leaving your software developer job, regardless of what you were asked to do. Is that right?

To be clear, we're not talking about risking food & shelter here. We're talking about risking one fewer skiing holiday a year, or buying the house with the slightly smaller swimming pool.

Building tools for mass surveillance, undermining employment regulations worldwide, addicting people to abusive tech, exploiting warehouse workers, breaking the law, propping up authoritarian governments. There's nothing you can think of that you'd put above your family's luxuries?

The average software engineer does not have a skiing holiday or a swimming pool. Even home ownership is down. The vast majority of people, even people making 100k+, do not have that luxury.

Grouping together millionaires with software developers working at Google doesn't make sense to me.

This whole debate is about drawing a line in the sand about morality that is convenient for the author. The same exact arguments could be made for any number of things anybody does every single day.

You're right. Your family comes first. Endowing your children with good moral sensibilities they can carry forward into the next generation is incredibly important. Hint, hint.

I guess you are the arbiter of moral righteousness in the world, then. Are you writing this on a computer? Where did the materials come from that built it? Conflict free? How about the wages for the person who built it?

Hint hint.

> I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had FU money

In other words, you feel that you cannot be secure unless you're in the, what, top 5% of the society? You can't have an entire society living on passive income until the AI revolution delivers.

And until you feel secure, everything is justified at work?

One of the real, hard, lessons of the coronavirus situation is that security is collective. You can hole up for a while, and avoid catching the virus yourself, but the economic effects will get everywhere.

> One of the real, hard, lessons of the coronavirus situation is that security is collective. You can hole up for a while, and avoid catching the virus yourself, but the economic effects will get everywhere.

Hence the need for FU money because the collective decisions are/will be lousy. You do not want to be dependent on the collective for security.

Not where this conversation started, but surely where it's going:

Your sentence really sounds like just an 'I got mine, so forget everyone else' sort of statement.

Your FU money doesn't mean a damned thing if societal norms die due to a pandemic or disaster. If anything, they'll just make you a target for the actual collective when it gets bad.

You can't help yourself, by yourself, if the whole world is crumbling. You have to be dependent on the collective for security. That's the literal point of a society existing. We have societal norms and collective good for a reason.

We used to kill a lot of the rich people, every so often, in history. Why have we forgotten that?

> Your FU money doesn't mean a damned thing if societal norms die due to a pandemic or disaster. If anything, they'll just make you a target for the actual collective when it gets bad.

We aren't talking about a French revolution type event here. In anything from Katrina to the Great Depression to even this current pandemic, financial security was/is crucial for maintaining your own well being.

And in the modern world where you can travel, it needs to be a truly global collapse for couple hundred thousand saved to not offer a path to safety.

The level of hubris shown here is obscene. The median household income in the United States was $63,179 in 2018. Richer neighborhoods? Richer schools? Give me a break. This is wanton greed on plain display, and blatant disregard for the systemmic suppression of the poor that you are directly enabling by working at bigcorp.

Do people that make the median household income in the USA feel secure? If they don't, your statistic is irrelevant. And in my experience they don't, especially if they live in higher cost of living areas where most of the tech jobs are.

No, you're not understanding my point. I'm contrasting this income with the one the OP says they want. The median household works hard for 60K, but the OP is suspending their ethical judgement until they have "a few hundred thousand in passive income". You don't need 6x the median income to feel secure.

Wow, as a fan of your web persona, I find your stance on this intriguingly Stallman-ish. All the more because you omit making the utilitarian fungibility-talent margin argument, which I'd expect you to be aware of.

I find refusing to "build the tools of oppression" more defensible on utilitarian grounds than denying to even use such tools (apart from practical considerations, that is e.g. vendor lockdown, privacy issues etc).

And yet you already claim to be boycotting evil corporations, which in my eyes amounts to pretty much that.

I suppose I can buy the "we shouldn't normalize morally wrong behaviour" as long as it remains defensible on utilitarian grounds i.e. working for megacorps. But I have a hard time seeing my use of e.g. google translate as morally wrong.

> And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you’re in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds for your kids.

Neither income nor wealth growth are zero sum games. This whole post reads like a bunch of excuses.

Can you put a ballpark net worth at which you would feel secure?

It's not a number. My goal is to secure income from various sources other than my labor, as well as developing political resources (which requires donations). Owning good real estate is also important, and that is very expensive.

Is it true there are only two possibilities: maximizing richness or heading to the poorhouse with family?

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