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Comment by simpleguitar | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with everything you've said.

The only difference between myself and my other friends (who also have advanced degrees from top universities in the bay area) is that I abandoned my field of study and jumped into tech.

After 10 years, we have vastly different financial outcomes now.

A lot of hard working, well educated, dedicated people struggle financially around here, because they happened to not choose tech.

Add in the teachers and other under-appreciated careers, I do feel guilty that I should have so much, and they so little.

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Part of working smart rather than working hard is seeing the salary signals the market is sending and responding to them strategically. This is worth more than mastering a skill that is saturated with competition relative to demand.

It took me a long time to accept this as I was wedded to the idea that hard work and skill alone should be well compensated. But that hard work and skill needs to be pointed in a good direction in the first place.

My grief (and grieving) is not with this.

If you had an advanced degree in math or physics, hedge funds in NYC was always an option to maximize your talent in exchange for money. But one also had an option to choose something different and still make an upper middle class living.

It seems these days, only the finance/tech offer such living. NOT choosing tech is choosing barely middle class living, and everyone else is delegated to hand-to-mouth living.

Where I live (DC) most people are not in tech and they still have an upper middle class lifestyle working for the Federal government or a contractor (in a non-tech role). Nationally, purchasing power has been declining for many years.

Besides Fed Gov, Tech/finance are the probably the only sectors left with large work forces, great margins, a culture of rewarding talent (vs health care for example), AND rooted in the USA (vs manufacturing and heavy industry). These factors combine to create a super class of tech/finance labor.

> This is worth more than mastering a skill that is saturated with competition relative to demand.

The job market is not an efficient market. It doesn’t respond to offer and demand signals.

Nurses have been in short supply in most of the developed world for the past three decades yet are still paid peanuts. It’s all about your proximity to the handling of money and historical trend. That’s why even people doing menial jobs in banking are well compensated while people working in heavy industries are paid relatively little compared to the complexity of their jobs.

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