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Comment by Itsdijital | Hacker News Reader

Interesting reading these comments. I think it is fair to say that HN is disproportionately wealthy, and the replies here seems to echo that.

I'll admit I am an outsider here. I used to work 2 jobs, before the pandemic, and made $46K annually combined, typically 65hrs/wk. Mind you this is in the NYC area too. I now make $40k thanks to a raise at my full-time job (defense manufacturing, its really just a private equity racket). I can barely afford minimum living. Part of that raise also includes more responsibility, so it might even be a loss because I'm not sure I could still work a second job.

I can assure you that there are tons of people in my position. Way more than there are tech workers with 6-figure salaries who are bored on the weekend. It's not pretty here on the bottom floors, and it has only been getting worse.

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The comments are telling, but I wanted to point out something from a different perspective.

I have friends from school who never really made it anywhere. One makes $12 an hour moving boxes around in Pennsylvania, another is stuck living at home and hasn't held down a job for more than a few months at any point in his life.

I have heard from this friend group, on many occasions, statements that prove they have no concept of relative value or of how money works at all. The guy making $12 an hour would be frustrated to hear you say that you make 40k and can barely afford minimum living. The cost of living differences between you would go completely unconsidered.

This is a roundabout way of saying that most people have a very narrow view of the world. Unfortunately, in my experience, it doesn't matter how educated, intelligent, or wealthy an individual is; they still resist expanding their world-view.

I'd also wager that many on HN have never held a minimum wage job or anything remotely blue collar. The disconnect here is a microcosm of this problem. The richer get richer, the poor get poorer, and the rich tell the poor to eat cake because they fundamentally just don't get it.

They maliciously choose to be ignorant. To whom much is given, much is required.

"With great power comes great responsibility" -Some dead guy

Preach, yo. Also, my name is h0p3. It's good to meet you.

That is a pretty bold wager! I'm curious as to what your experiences have been to come to it.

Anecdotally speaking, most of the folks I've worked with in tech (including myself) have come from modest means and worked low wage jobs at some point (blue collar jobs aren't necessarily low wage, and what's considered blue collar can also be tech). The disconnect you speak of I think is more of a disconnect in value systems between folks, and hell even those value systems can be disparate across folks with similar incomes. I think value systems follow people as they gain wealth (more or less), and there are plenty of people at the bottom fighting for the people at the top in the USA.

Not OP, it's a wager about some average of other people based on how they talk.

The absolute best case for tech workers under 40 is they worked in a kitchen or factory on summers, did real work and saw/empathized with how the other half lives. And even that is rare. Lots had internships instead of that routine.

I think people that have been poor / hold minimum wage jobs are more likely to not care about poor people. I fall into this camp. On the other hand I think hacker news is predominantly liberal and seems to care very much for poor people.

Hard to be empathetic if you don’t even know what it’s like to be in their shoes.

And plenty of conservatives care about the poor. Ever been down south in a poor area? People look out for their neighbors way more than they do in big cities.

Caring about people you can see, hear and talk to is the bare minimum of human empathy.

The South doesn't get points for that while lobbying to destroy people based on stereotypes it imagines.

The strongest opinions on any group are always from those with the least contact with them.

With minimal contact you get a forced, paternalistic empathy. Picture “the white mans burden” in Africa.

I think this is such a reductive take of The South. A great tool for understanding a culture is sometimes to place it historically so you can be more objective. For one, The South has more black people and poor than anywhere else in the country, meanwhile liberal states like Oregon, Vermont, and so on are some of the whitest, so the theory that it’s about lack of contact is obviously lacking.

The South places strong emphasis on self-reliance and community, to a degree other areas might consider to a fault. That manifests in wanting smaller government, less outside intervention, close-knit communities and neighbor friendliness, and so on. Someone “whining about how hard life is and begging for handouts” (said by someone from The South) is in their eyes selfishly draining their community because of their lack of self reliance.

To an extent: this is true. The South is relatively poor so they know better than most - there are many people who would rather get handouts than make better decisions. This is also wrong in many cases: many people are poor systematically, and are in a rut where self reliance isn’t enough. There’s tons of complexity to these things that both sides paint black and white.

The South isn’t your culture but mean, like some seem to think. It’s a different culture in many ways. One where pride, self reliance, and community are really important. If you want to have a chance at solving some of these problems and answering these questions you should be aware of this.

Self-determinism is something I really struggle with.

I was always extremely poor growing up, even homeless at times during high school.

I watched countless friends from middle-class families totally squander their futures and now they mostly work dead-end jobs.

Meanwhile I was homeless after high school, robbed of my scholarships, and had to suffer greatly for years in order to get on my feet.

I feel like I earned the money I have. And that I deserve even more.

At the same time, everywhere I go people tell me how smart and adaptable I am and it makes me feel like I cannot base my expectations of others upon myself.

I think the core principle is that exceptionalism is exceptional. Don't ask masses of people to be exceptional. It's impossible, that's why "exceptional" comes from "exception".

So I guess we have to define what is exceptional.

That's easy, here it goes:

Rising above one's social class at birth is exceptional.

What do you think is the lower bound?

Software Engineers getting richer is the least of your worries. I'd like to talk about billionaires. The impossibly wealthy.

We need to have a society that pays well for high demand jobs. Please don't shit on Engineers. There are millions of people out there that are sitting on real estate old money, rich families, etc. They're not doing shit. They're not building the world around you. One mega billionare would dwarf a crowd of Engineers.

I want to live in a society where science and technology jobs are paid well and even fine with absurdly well. Same with doctors.

I also want to live in a society where shitty jobs such as cleaning gutters and driving a trash truck around should also be paid well because no one wants to do those. If you're stuck flipping burgers, you have the onus to do something that's worth while and in high demand. We need to make sure we give access to those people who want to learn and get educated.

Google's employee base making $450k/year is a miniscule part of software engineers. My guess would be US-wide, the average software engineer earns less than six figures or very close to it. Not "Rich" by any means.

I am tired of the marxist bs. I barely make six figures and that's after years of toiling through shitty code bases and mentally exhausted everyday and raising a family. I do boring software and anything that's thrown at me. Not what you have in mind as "Rich". Rich is relative.

Leave engineers alone, bang on billionaire's door. I've added more value to the society and I demand an equivalent pay. The real disconnect is with the mega billionaires playing golf at the Hamptons. Anyone with a salary is by definition unleveraged and not "Rich" in my view.

Leave engineers alone, bang on billionaire's door.

Nope. Sorry (she/he/they) dude. You don’t get to point up the ladder and say “i’m not rich, but that guy is”. Reminds me people who define someone with an alcohol problem as a person “who has one more drink a day then I do”.

If you’re an engineer at Google and making $450k you are wealthy, you are a part of the “rich getting richer” and yes, if you want to solve inequality you’re going to have to contribute in a big way.

Edit: And no, your original post said “go after the billionaires”, not the engineers. Sorry, just because billionaires have more money than you doesn’t mean you’re not rich. Sure, the engineers making $50k get a pass. But over $100k? That’s double the median salary in the US. Time to pony up.

Perhaps you missed my point - I was specifically making the argument of non-Googlers. Google Engineers and SV salaries do not represent software engineering ecosystem and the average salary.

Also, please don't assume my gender.

Edit: Pony up for what? It's not a zero sum game.

Edit: Lol, I am a "He dude". :)

Nothing is wrong with being wealthy after developing a coveted and high-demand skillset.

The point is that it's the ultra-wealthy you need to be concerned with.

This misses the point as to why though: because it's not an incremental ladder, it's an exponential one - the wealth consolidated by the billionaire class is buying politics. It has an outsized influence on the thinking and mindset of the political classes they donate too and talk to on weekends.

This isn't just an issue like bribery it's more insidious then that: when your political leaders spend most of their "leisure" time in the company of these people, they adopt their values, listen to their thoughts and give everything a favorable view - more of hearing then you and I will ever get.

After all it's hard to be down on a guy who's put you up for the afternoon at his mansion, and even though you know it's a bad look to take him up on it it sure is nice he keeps offering the master guest suite if you want to stay the night.

This is just hand waving. Sure the billionaire has exponentially more, but there are very few of them.

We won’t solve inequality by taxing the billionaires it’ll be from taxing the upper-middle class. Just like the states with more equality in Europe do.

If you’re in the top 25% of income you’ll need to make some sacrifices if you want to solve the problem.

There are very few of them, and yet they control the vast majority of the country's wealth. The top 1% owns 55% of all the valuable assets in the United States. The top 10% owns 85% of all valuable assets. Most of the remaining 15% of assets are owned by pension funds and small-time landlords.

Just by taxing that top 10% (roughly people who earn over 200k/yr), the government would get access to 85% of all the nation's wealth.

That’s exactly my point. It’s not the billionaires who own most of the wealth, but the top 10% which includes people making over $200k per year. There are LOTS of those folks. That’s where the bill of the wealth is.

No, that's where about 30% of the wealth is. The bulk of the wealth is the 55% that is owned by the top 1%, roughly people making over $550,000/yr

What is "55%" if not "most of the wealth"?

The first half of your comment and the second half contradict.

I forget the exact statistic, but did you know that something like 70% of those on the Forbes 400 Richest list are entirely self made? Did you know that the vast majority of millionaires in the US received $0 in inheritance, and far more received less than $10k? The rich, by and large, made their wealth in their lifetime with their own means.

I say this because we need to make better arguments and be more honest with the situation. No, we aren’t entitled to the money of the rich just because “they have too much” or something. Redistribution is desireable because the economics are fundamentally changing with winner take all economies, regulatory capture, the ability to influence government policy with wealth, and the massive increase in the general welfare achieveable with stronger redistribution.

Getting mad at rich people because they have bigger numbers in their bank account is a weak argument, disingenuous, and immoral. The truth is much simpler: redistribution results in a more successful society.

Marxist? You mean, having empathy for other people? Reading the comments on HN on this topic, it's largely people disconnected from the problems of a large subset of society and offering terrible and often insulting advice.

Does making less money than a billionaire somehow absolve you of this disconnect? You can make 50k a year and still be a complete dick to people.

I get what you're saying in some sense. The gorilla in the room is the fact that the true rich are taxed totally differently (and mostly unfairly). But also pointing to richer people and saying "they are the problem" is part of the problem. We're all voters and we all vote. If we want to, we could absolutely change the system and make it fairer. As much as it is the billionaire's "fault", it is also our responsibility to make the right choices, politically and socially.

But as long as we keep fighting each other and calling people absurd names like "Marxist", nothing will change.

I do have empathy for the poor. I used to work at a Shell gas station and I've talked to all kinds of people from Land Rover high rollers to drug addicts buying glass roses.

When you talk to the people flipping burgers in America, youll see a whole spectrum. And when you see these people earning a minimum wage and waste their life smoking weed, modifying their cars with shit they can't afford and playing video games all day, I have zero empathy for them. There are people that want to improve and I've had several conversations how they can't afford education or vocational school or any sort of apprentice practice. I have a lot of empathy for them.

If you don't understand why people would rather waste their life vs work up the ladder, you have a very poor understanding of what it means to be poor in America.

Surprise surprise, the person who claims they "understand" or "empathize" for the poor actually has no empathy or understanding at all! Really just confirming my original point. HN users have no idea what is going on.

Rich get rich by paying software engineers to develop applications that deliver efficiencies. Efficiencies usually mean getting rid of workers.

Newspapers used to be big local employers, newsroom employees, print workers, packaging workers, delivery workers. Software engineers developed news applications for rich people and many newspaper workers lost jobs.

The increase in legal and illegal immigration has cause labor supply increase, while jobs have fluctuated, resulting in stagnant or decreasing salaries.

Offshoring manufacturing and services to China also led to decrease in employment opportunities.

These factors are real but working around them is just a matter of proper government policy. Of course, the problem is a lack of willingness to work around them.

The government made the decisions that results in rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. The rich oligarchs are getting great returns on their investments and owning government. While millions of people are facing declining quality of society.

California had millions of people without power during summer fires. Texas just had millions of people without power during winter cold. These are third world type events, society can’t deliver basic life infrastructure.

The rich owned government is responsible for declining quality of social structures for millions of people. They don’t care, they can just distract with BLM and social strife, instead of improving quality of society and preserving job opportunities for

While I agree with a lot of what you said, unless first world means “perfect and flawless”, what happened in California and Texas arent “third world events”. Our systems have limits, even multi billion $ systems built by very smart engineers. Rolling wildfires across a state is infrequent on that scale in California. That cold snap in Texas was one of the lowest ever on record. These are rare events that to prepare against except in hindsight would seem like a waste of everyone’s money. France and other places in Europe lose power during heatwaves and cold snaps. That’s just reality.

Our grid isn’t prepped for a nuclear war, or an alien invasion for the same reason. That’s not a third world outcome, that’s a look behind the curtain to see how fallible the world just is.

I agree, when I read the comments I get the impression that most of the commenters take it for granted that two jobs must be read as two part time jobs. I have not found the paper and the article does not suggest anything. If it is part time jobs people are talking about when they have answered the questionaire, though, the headline should have suggested that an increasing number of people struggle to get full time jobs? More part time employment in low wages jobs is a social problem, of course. More people having to take more than a full time job to make ends meet is a bigger problem in a society, though.

I make good money now (not tech) but didn’t always and yeah, the vast majority of the population (where I was born and the US - both developed countries) get by on very little. They aren’t necessarily poor (in the sense they can’t afford necessities) but rather never financially secure. Having $2000 sitting in a bank account would be a major win for them.

I remember working a box factory when I was in college. For me and a few other students it was a great summer job. Unionized, paid double the minimum wage, etc. For the non-students I realized they were lifers - this was a really great job, would pay the bills with some left over and it was unlikely something better would come their way. They weren’t poor, but they had hit a ceiling in terms of their financial situation.

Very eye opening.

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