I think sympathy and compassion are fine ideals to hold for any of our working class cohort.
“Working class” lol. Class-wise, engineers are like the junior executives in the Mad Men era, or junior lawyers and bankers today. They are not only well compensated, but have tons of impact (and therefore leverage) as individual contributors.
The “working class” are the folks cleaning the building who are fungible commodities. You can be a 10x janitor and it won’t give you any leverage in the organization, and you have no pathway to upward mobility in the executive ranks.
Anyone who relies on wage labor for their income (as opposed to earnings from capital) is working class. That is the defining feature of the working class.
Unless you could retire tomorrow and support yourself from your capital holdings alone, you're a member of the working class. (Many engineers at Twitter likely could retire tomorrow and live off their equity, but I'm guessing the majority could not.)
People love to erode class solidarity by claiming that only people whose incomes are below a certain level are working class, or that you have to "work with your hands" to be working class. Don't fall for it.
Since when is that the definition? Doctors and lawyers have never been considered part of the "working class." Software engineers, and other categories of jobs that didn't really exist in the 1930s, are more similar to those professionals than to working class people.
> People love to erode class solidarity by claiming that only people whose incomes are below a certain level are working class
You've got it exactly backward. The top 10% has been pulling away from the median American for decades now. They're beneficiaries of the same forces that have produced outsized growth for the top 0.1%. They write the software, paper the deals, put together the PowerPoint presentations, etc., that enable those trends.
The delusion among skilled professionals that they are part of the "working class," and their influx into the putatively labor-aligned political party, has had a tremendously negative effect on working class interests. They champion policies like globalization and mass immigration that benefit them at the expense of factory and farm workers. They spent divert vast amounts of political capital to social issues important to highly educated people, at the expense of economic issues important to the working class. And they make it impossible to pay for expansive social services the way other developed countries pay for them: by heavily taxing the upper middle class.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class#Marxist_definiti...
In Marx's dichotomy, ownership of the means of production is critical because workers are utterly dependent on that capital to be able to produce anything. That's not true of knowledge workers. A programmer, like a doctor or a lawyer, isn't dependent on a capital owner to produce the thing they sell.
Financial literacy is something that desperately needs to be part of the curriculum in high school and I can empathize with people that will struggle as a result of their layoffs even if it's due to their own money mismanagement, but software engineers being laid off from a tech giant are definitely not working class in any sense.
Put another way, people will behave as you treat them. Treat them like they are fools who can't do finances and they will behave that way. Expect them to do basic financial behavior and they will.
We literally make financial literacy courses free, online, without any need to even sign up. They will teach you what a bank is all the way up to 401k basics.
The PersonalFinance Wiki for the /r/PersonalFinance subreddit is actually very nice and covers a lot of common situations: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
Investopedia maintains an excellent and well written dictionary on financial terms, with a mix of articles. I use this website heavily: https://www.investopedia.com/financial-term-dictionary-47697... They have a personal wealth section here: https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance-4427760 and a good place to start is: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/09/financial-respon...
If you want a software aid, YNAB is pretty good and is based on a solid set of principles. https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/ Obviously lots of other options exist to manage your money and YNAB is not the only option, but it's a good one.
If a resource suggests any kind of particular stock picks, crypto or other "investments", it's bad. It exists to sell you a product.
Save money from each paycheck. If you're just starting, put this into an emergency fund (savings account) until you have 6 month's take-home pay saved.
Then start savings in equities. You should diversify this, i.e. in low-fee index funds. Do this in an IRA or other tax-advantaged plan your employer might offer. Don't watch this too closely or try to time the market. Just invest with every paycheck.
Understand the time value of money. Don't go into long term debt for short term needs or consumables. Live below your means so you can save more and maximize compounding gains in savings/investments.
Do these things and you are well ahead of most people. If you want to get more sophisticated at that point, look for courses or professional advice, but remember pros rarely beat the market.
If someone is making $200,000 a year and is financial trouble when they get laid off (with severance), well, I reserve my tears for people who never see that kind of income their entire life.
That's not how adulthood works. The world doesn't care if you learned it nor will it teach you. Besides, it doesn't take a course in finance to understand basic financial responsibility.
Adults can teach themselves most things given the right tools and incentive. Your viewpoint essentially means nothing is ever problematic ever. Invasive rhinos released onto SF streets causing property damage? Why didn't SF residents learn to defend themselves and their property damage. The world doesn't care if you learn or not. Climate change leading to drought and the entire world is starving? Should have done a little thinking ahead and stockpiled food.
Half my coworkers lack these basic skills and they drive around in $100k Teslas.
The guy can't even make coffee at home or a sandwich. Never had to do it. They are true man-childs.
Despite the creativity of your rhinos scenarios, the point still stands. Somebody that did proper financial planning would be better equipped to cover the property damage.
And yes, you very much should stockpile food. I have 6 months worth, and adding. I hope you're right and I turn out to the paranoid one, that would be best for the world. But just to give a hint: where I live protesting farmers led to some empty shelves. Nothing existential, but just to share how very quickly such a thing happens and how close it was to a more serious issue. Or, perhaps consider the entirety of Eastern Africa about to face a possible famine. Or, consider Sri Lanka being totally fucked.
I don't say this to hate or judge, I say it to help. Take care of your shit, this world is volatile.
It’s also not clear that Twitter would be able to block sales once you are no longer an employee; my guess is that they can’t.
Financial literacy is quite literally adding and subtracting numbers. For somebody who gets in to FAANG sort of companies with mad algorithm skills. This sort of things are a cake walk. Financial Literacy applies to people who just didn't get any education. We are talking of people who can't even read and write.