This is an interesting point to take away. If you are smart and want to get rich, going into engineering is not your best bet. Same for scientists.
No wonder there are shortages, eh?
I suspect that roughly 30% of the engineering population at Google is in the 1% (given what I know of salary scales and what fraction of engineers are at each eng level). That works out to maybe 4-5k engineers (assuming half the company is engineering), out of the 6,746 in "Computer & data processing services". You really think that Google accounts for 80% of the 1% in software developers? Where's Facebook and Twitter in there - them alone should push it over the count given?
No - what's happening is that most of those well-paid software engineers are single. Of the ones that aren't, many of them married college sweethearts who work as teachers or yoga instructors or urban planners or other professions that don't make a whole lot of money. One Google senior-SWE total comp will put you in the 1% as a single taxpayer, two of them will put you in the 1% as a household, but one of them plus a teacher's salary will not get you anywhere close to the 1%.
I don't think the graph excludes single-person households. It's certainly easier to be in the 1% with two incomes, but it's not a prerequisite.
This whole 99/1% label thing is silly.
I haven't been able to find good data on individual income, sadly. At least in part because if one uses AGI then all you have to go with are tax returns and if a married couple files jointly the AGI will just be the joint number and that's that. But people also keep claiming this is "household" income, which doesn't quite match AGI in many cases (e.g. married-filing-separately situations, households which consist of taxpayers who are not married to each other, households with more than 2 taxpayers, etc).
I really wish the data-gathering methodology were actually spelled out somewhere. :(
This notion of "shortage" bugs me. There's two sides to a "shortage": supply and demand; but they meet at a point determined by price, where both are equal. There is always a "shortage": demand for engineers that isn't fulfilled by supply, because they can't afford to pay the engineers enough. But there is also always a "surplus": too many engineers to warrant high income levels in the 1%, etc.
A shortage would actually exist in a rigid market with inefficiencies, e.g. price fixing. To the degree that's not true, we don't have a shortage.
This is a common thought I see a lot on HN, but it's completely bollocks.
The elasticity of salary is not infinitely scalable, and is heavily based on the costs and profitability of the business. Say we took away all the taxi cab drivers in the world, demand would be immense and supply would be next to nil - in your fantasy world cab drivers would start making hojillions.
But of course, there is an upper bound to the value of a cab ride - cab fares would rise, but it won't not rise to astronomical levels simply because the cost will start exceeding the utility of the ride itself.
So yeah, in a shortage situation developer pay would rise - and rise they have, particularly in hotly-contested areas like the Bay, but this entitled attitude where "there's no shortage! I'm not making a million bucks a year yet!" is complete horseshit.
If there was 10x the supply of programmers, we could have 10x the number of jobs for them to do: they could be coming around to your house and offering to automate various bits and pieces of your life, they could be hanging around at traffic lights helping people stopped in cars optimize their phone usage, etc.
The profitability of the business is in part a function of its costs. That the business exists at all is based on an assumption of a certain level of costs, where at different costs other options may be more viable.
What I'm getting at is that there is a circularity in your objection. You assume things about the current state of supply and demand based on the current market mix of businesses, but the current market mix of businesses is the way it is in part because of the current state of supply and demand.
Yes, there is certainly a lack of elasticity in salary. The market isn't perfect. People aren't fungible. But the market is efficient enough to value e.g. doctors and lawyers quite highly. It simply doesn't value software engineers in the same way. That's just the way it is; I'm not saying it's right or wrong, and nor am I moaning about my wages (actually, I deliberately choose lower wages in return for more interesting work and flexibility in where I live).
What I am moaning about is people talking about an excess of supply or demand, like it's a plain fact.
You are right that an engineer's pay can only go so high. However, when the rate exceeds what you can afford, you simply bow out and do something different. Hire someone who does not have talent or refrain from doing the work.
Ferraris exceed what I am willing to pay for an automobile, but you won't hear me complaining that there is a shortage of Ferraris. Instead, I will buy a lesser car (an unskilled worker) and make do, or forego car ownership altogether.
A shortage implies that all the money in the world can still not allow you to fulfill your needs. If the fulfillment is out there, but you are not willing to pay the prices, that is not a shortage.
If doctors who realise they can work 9-5, and have lots of holidays, and still have a great standard of living, why should they work longer hours? It does actually happen.
Of coures the mainstream economic explanation is that if this was predictable, students will have been driven into courses before the shortage occurred (it's called "rational behavior", or "the assumption that everyone is smarter than an economist").
Obviously, some people just like work, and money. Marx was right - people can accumulate cash simply for the sake of accumulating cash (or the security it brings), not just for pure consumption.
So why do you think there is still a shortage, when there is in fact funding for innovation? Do you think the returns would be worth more investment, diverted from other current investments? If so, you should be able to convince enough other people to fund it. If not, does that not prove the weakness of your argument? ;)
(I'm arguing this with a hat on. That is, I'm taking a position that's actually somewhat more extreme than my real position, to see how it feels. I'm actually opposed to the market in many cases, but not because of quibbling over supply and demand, but rather because it is amoral - not immoral, amoral - as in it has no moral content. There is no intrinsic fairness in it. It just is, a machine driven by people's consumption, without consideration for whether their tastes are right or wrong.)
The only way to really excel as engineer or scientist is to move out of the role into a position that is people oriented, like manager. Even if you choose the entrepreneurial route, it is not the engineering that pays the bills, it is the interacting with other people. If you want your business to be successful, you will have to eventually delegate out the engineering so that you can focus on building the business.
With that, if you are only driven by financial gains (as opposed to the love of doing), why would anyone bother with the science/engineering step when you can put all of your focus on people-oriented jobs from the start?
Engineering and software development are fields where you can consistently make very respectable wages. Risk aversion is a factor, after all...
60k or 100k? Maybe my perspective will change with age but I'd bat for the million.
I'm in Houston and I have to put some qualifications on that. Only CERTAIN petroleum engineers would make 1% kind of money. I would think the statistics would mirror software engineers roughly. Maybe a little better, maybe a little worse. Just nowhere even close to Dentists and Doctors.
Not that it really matters, since what catches fire politically is only modestly correlated with what is actually true.
The implications of that are many but the first and direct is that the US is a plutocracy. That is, the movement is not about (not) "becoming rich" or achieving the 1% (which as you imply would ultimately be a contradiction) ... It is about the nature and sustainability of such a society.
Half of the electorate pays no federal income tax in the U.S.
To them, it's about making enough money to fund their projects, or making something noteworthy enough to get hired by somebody else who can.