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Comment by eh9 | Hacker News Reader

Most Americans don’t have $1000 in savings.

And? Thats fking pathetic and nearly every single healthy, unburdened FAANG engineer should be deahtly embarrassed to find themselves in such a situation.

But for those reading this who are "crying in bathrooms", what does it say about your lifestyle thst you likely made 2-3x my salary, and yet i walked away from tech for years while youre somehow fearful of making ends meet?

I eat what i want, i have money for more weed and booze and casual friendships than i can dream of. I am fucking disgusted with this "trying to make it seem like fired tech workers are as pitiable as average americans".

No. No more. You want me to cry for your lost Google salary, i wanna see numbers.

This entire shit conversation is privileged and absurd and ignorant of what the left has advocated for for decades ... to a point i pull at my hair.

Seriously, this fucking website is gonna cry over fired tech workers when hundreds of thousands of americans who make less than 5% of google salary experience this, regularly, without severance, health care and a halfway decent shot at findinf a new job. Really? Ive seen the attitudes that are popular here. BUT GOD FORBID SOMEONE QUESTION THE SPENDING HABITS OF THE SELF-IMAGINED-AS-WEALTHY TECH CLASS?!

You’re mad at the wrong demographic. Direct your anger higher up, not at people working and not at regular ass people who are willing and able to save, but also have life obligations that make that difficult. The upper middle class isn’t the actual enemy, despite their accessibility & visibility to you which, I know, can be grating.

If you’re making FAANG money you are in no way “upper middle class” by any statistical definition.

Maybe you can’t our little Johny in the private school, max out your 401K, save enough so he doesn’t have to demean himself and go to a cheaper state school, etc. if you work for BigTech and you haven’t been saving, it’s because of your own life choices that people who make less than half of what you do don’t make and they aren’t homeless or hungry.

No this isn’t jealous. I work for $BigTech.

I know that, I also know who enables them and is ignorant of the score, because theyre blinded by rampant thoughtless consumerism. I know which ones have a hope of being convinced and have a self-interest in a better path. (And I tried to word the op carefully enough to leave exceptions for <insert niche scenario>)

But maybe I should be more careful in how I speak. Class consciousness is key and I didnt know any better until I did.

But also I know whats it like to live in a nice, newly built 2br apt in the second most expensive tech city. And I know how to make that work, coasting, on ~60k/yr, without free meals, without free orca cards, without free shuttles across town. So when i see 5year xooglers that i know made 300k+ the entire time, my head starts to pulsate.

When I think about how i can draw what i draw off my (big tech co) stock, and then I think about those same xooglers, and their stock benefits...

It just feels like these conversations are borderline dishonest with the handwaving and intentional lack of discussion of specifics, and any consideration of the meta of how this tragic, unthinkable event is discussed here compared to other topics related to labor.

Like I said, easier said than done. Having at least a year's worth of savings is a path to psychology safety while working in tech, which is what they were asking about. I learned this lesson earlier in my career during the Dot Com Bust when I, too, didn't have $1000 in savings.

The OP isn’t the “typical American”. He is making FAANG salaries.

But I had six months worth of living expenses in the bank by the time I had been working for a year and a half in the 90s. I made $11/hour as a computer operator. But they needed someone to build a data entry system and do some other development for their second site they were trying to build. I saved every penny of my after tax overtime.

I’ve made sure I’ve had six months worth of expenses saved from the time I was 22. I am now 49. Anytime I took on a new fixed expense, I made sure I had six times that amount in the bank shortly thereafter.

That mindset kept me off the hedonic treadmill. I work for $BigTech remotely. Until last year I was driving a 2011 Ford Fusion that I got from CarMax in 2012 for $14K.

I won’t get started about how we gave up everything to live out of three suitcases and fly around the US half the year and stay in our own vacation home/rental property the other half.

SEs should have more though

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