Meanwhile, these same companies are still paying front-line workers barely more than minimum wage.
Do you think this sort of wealth inequality is sustainable for society?
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/report-card-microsofts-board-b...
Particularly true at early-stage startups: https://topstartups.io/startup-salary-equity-database/
I graduated with a BS at 23 and was making that ~400k/yr by 30. (Even 1,000,000+/yr before that actually - equity grants are beautiful until they crash…) Now because I’m a dipshit who held onto all the stocks rather than sold - I actually have only ever really lived off of a much more meager salary and most of my equity has vaporized…
But if I had sold… If I had… :’(
Again - I’m an unexceptional case. Like super boring. First generation college student. Grew up poor-ish. Rural American. Yadda yadda but made it quite well if you ignore my equity constantly getting destroyed by interest rate hikes and what not.
If you spend casually on what’s left, you are essentially working to live.
This book influenced my thinking about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
It pairs nicely with Henry George's understanding of land, capital, and labour.
Market scarcity increases the value of a commodity.
SWE jobs are now favored among immigrants (poor and wealthy), because this is their only chance to make a dent in US living expenses. I am one of the poor immigrant (yes I know how it feels working $7.5/hr scrubbing a restaurant that just closed by the health department using bleach while kneeling all day), now having $300k TC, and my entire family are either divorced or single, and all female. I could send money to them in my home country and still have more than enough for me here. I definitely won't want to get paid lower.
What is more unsustainable, IMO, is the concentration of work. 3 out of 10 men and 4 out of 10 women over 20 year's age in the US are not working. Working far in excess of 40 hours per week is common. US vacation is still generally a paltry 2 weeks, non-mandatory.
And all this, despite continual improvements in productivity over the past century.
Couldn't we collectively reduce our working hours, have more vacation time, and employ more people? That would more fairly disperse the productivity gains of technology and improve many people's lives.
1. 4 day work week to address your concerns.
But a 4 day work week will mean some business will go to a 4 day shift and a 3 day shift. And of course, some people will do two jobs so they can out compete their neighbouring Jones... so a 4 day week with some kind of enforcement?!? Not sure how that'd work.
2. Employee equity in the business. If an investor gets a dividend, so do the employees. This helps balance everyone vs the 1%'ers. Of course, there's a lot of details in that too like everything in life.
Step 1 for that to ever be realistic is to sever the connection between your employer and your health insurer.
An additional complication is that employing two part-time employees means you needed to train and hope the knowledge actually transferred twice, but that is trivial in comparison to paying the benefits for two employees (IIRC, benefits are more of a fixed per-employee cost rather than something that pretends to be related to hours worked, like salary).
The thing is mostly those people not working are not productive people generally.
Whether it's through lack of relevant skills, or lack of volition and opportunity, or drugs, or inter-generational welfare, or whatever.
The reality is some people take and take and don't create. It's cheaper to pay someone capable and motivated a programming salary than try to get those people to be productive, otherwise human resource markets would have used those people already.
That's not to say that support/facilities roles should be paid as low as they are. But the high pay is not as common as is represented. For example, I have 10 years experience, a MS, but make under $100k.
SWE salaries are good, but people throw around 300k like some average 24 year old is making that easily.
I'm 26 and have set to meet that median salary. These hyped salaries are more like a gold rush like NFTs where everyone acts like its just all free money.
Like the old saying goes "An alcoholic is someone who has one more drink than I do".
Not to mention 40k a year puts you in the top 1 percent of salaries worldwide...so unless you make less than that, you are also a top 1 percentile income maker.
End of the day - these “highly” paid workers are… workers. They’re not capitalists like their CEOs are.
Amazing when tech "workers" making $500K+ per year group themselves in with the "little guy".
Someone else being richer doesn't mean you're not rich.
That alone should give you an idea of the difference between these people.
But whatever man - you’re like this on Reddit and on here all the time. You’re extremely stubborn and refuse to move on in life. Have fun with that attitude.
But regardless, silicon valley workers get equity as well that is taxed as capital gains - some times that makes up a very large proportion of their income. This is doubly true with equity from start-ups that might entirely be taxed at long-term capital gains.
But the point stands - what's the cut off. Sure, the guy making $40k is different than the billionaire. What about the guy making $500k? $1M? $5M? Now we're in CEO territory. Are CEOs "workers"?
The argument just doesn't hold water.
But you said it's the difference between "upper middle class" and rich? So I ask again, what's the cut off?
Even among those making over 200k, there’s a qualitative difference between needing to work and being able to live off passive income. To say someone making 500k a year has more in common with someone who has immense generational wealth just misses the point. The political incentives are different.
I’m obviously aware that all shareholders have a voting stake - but most of their stakes are so small as to be negligible.
You have extremely weak arguments and constantly try to choose tiny things to create a wedge issue. Your argumentation is ineffective and trollish. You don’t win any arguments - you just troll online. I get it - you have nothing better to do with your life. It’s why I see you all over posting all the time. You’re like an old man yelling into the wind. And like that man - soon to be dust in it.
Which makes me think you’re just wrong and can’t admit it?
This is technically inaccurate. RSUs are taxed as "ordinary income" on the date they vest. _AND_ they are also subject to capital gains taxes when they are sold.
To make this concrete, I am less concerned about how much AWS pays its SWEs than I am about their market dominance making it so a huge number of workers who could have worked in a more humane business have no other choice because the competition has been crushed. Cutting SWE pay and redistributing to warehouse workers would result in 1) SWEs leaving and going to one of the many companies that continue to pay more for their rare skills and 2) a relatively small raise when distributed across warehouse workers, which would be eroded away by the bean counters over time since there is no employer competition left.
In the short term basic income and better social safety nets are a stop gap.
In the medium term we can invest so much more in humans on planet earth. Just about anyone can learn to code. People still gatekeep it and say it's only for a special few. People used to say that about reading too. What coding even means gets simpler and simpler all the time. Some people argue excel is coding.
So we teach people to make anything and encourage way more startups, research, art, and culture (each wealth in their own way).
Look at Facebook's stock (FB symbol) the past year. Between February 2nd and 3rd of this year it fell from $323 to $237.76.
> And the fact that it's just a limited number of people making these wages emphasizes that it's a wealth inequality problem. I'm not sure how that would be a counteargument.
I think it _is_ a counterargument because a comparison between average software engineer pay and average frontline worker pay probably looks like you'd expect as far as market forces are concerned.
It's only when you move on from averages and start to focus on outliers where it looks like "problem." I would definitely consider FAANG engineers who make $300,000+ per year outliers.
The main issue to be concerned about, that’s repeatedly and deliberately ignored IMO, is the workers’ actual buying power. Wage disparity doesn’t really matter: Kevin Durant or Elon Musk will always make probably 10,000 times in a year than I do, yet I live great. Our wage disparity isn’t a concern to me: they currently provide more value to the world than I do, and their paychecks reflect that.
The real issue is buying power. It doesn’t matter if the minimum wage is increased to 15 or 25 or even 100 an hour if that buys increasingly less. There’s little way to save and hide your money if inflation continuously robs you and harms the poor more than the rich, who have the ability to hedge against inflation.
Inflation is a stealth tax on the poor. People who live on the margins are screwed by their purchasing power being drained. We live in a time of very high inflation and the same old solutions demanded of “better pay” or more taxes on the rich are not a systemic solve.
The real transfer of wealth, and the real class-disparity has always been things related to inflation. Go back and look at old prices of houses, milk, candy, burgers, etc. Yes, people made less salary of course, but could easily afford a good life. Wages never keep pace with inflation.
A real systemic solve is addressing the things surrounding money that nobody talks about or dismisses IMO.
PS: that wasn’t my 2 cents. That was my 9 cents. In the time it took you to read this inflation increased the price. Maybe if you think about how that works in relation to purchasing power you’ll start to see the bigger issue.
but they still need tax payer money to fund their business, atleast for Elon, no idea who Kevin is.
Wish you understood that. Wish everyone understood that.
Secondly, what the kids are calling "TeeCee" is an optimistic projection. A lot of people get randomly PIP-raped in the first year and aren't going to see that bonus or the equity. All it takes is for some scumbag in your management chain to knife you, and you're gonna miss out on a serious chunk of that TC.
Thirdly, private-sector SWE is a 10-year career at most. The insane time tracking, atrocious management, and abysmal code quality tend to drive people out, and even if they don't, the ageism is severe. You'll either pushed into political malevolency (that is, management, the job of enforcing the will of a bourgeoisie that should have been forcibly overthrown a generation or two ago) or unceremoniously kicked out.
Fourth, the numbers you're talking about aren't even that high. You can't even buy a house in the Bay Area on that kind of salary. Most of the truly high-paying jobs go to political manipulators and backstabbing social climbers, just as been the case for centuries before. The future never came--human society is the same shitpile it has always been, due to the world being run by a class of uncultured thugs.
All that said, you shouldn't feel guilty if you're in the position to get one of the few middle-class jobs that still exists. Make sure though that it's a real tech job (an R&D job where you're trusted to pick and choose projects, and can publish papers if that's what you're into) and not some Jira jockey nonsense that will cause your career to stagnate.