> a bunch of rich executives
Before we grab the pitchforks and guillotines, exactly how "rich" are DigitalOcean's executives?
Before we grab the pitchforks and guillotines, exactly how "rich" are DigitalOcean's executives?
[1] https://s27.q4cdn.com/619704647/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
Jokes aside, I was surprised to learn that there are 24 million millionaires in the U.S. that's more than 10% the working-age population. It's still a minority of course, and probably most of them are people who saved enough throughout their whole career (while here we were talking about people who made multiple millions every year), but still I found it interesting
If you own your house, you can easily be a "millionaire" based on the total cost of ownership but that doesn't mean you have anywhere near the disposable income or institutional power as an exec making upwards of 5 million dollars per year.
Net worth is assets minus liabilities.
If you had no savings or investments and a $100,000 house with a $99,000 mortgage your net worth would be $1,000, not a million dollars.
Do they count stocks which are held but not cashed out and do they count houses which are subject to mortgages?
If no, then that is a truly impressive number, I think even Switzerland does not come close by percentage.
Even the median wealth in the USA is 94k per adult, vs 26k for China and Europe.
Not only is the USA ahead of the game by a ridiculous amount, they’re making progress faster.
And when I travelled there and to other rich countries, all this was confirmed again; in the material weatlh, but also culturally.
The numbers are in, and I think we can call a winner in the economic systems contest.
As far as I remember, the American median salary was closer to 50k, Germany close to 45, France close to 40k. Don't have the numbers on hand, but off the top of my head.
There are no salary numbers in your report about wealth, which is why I cited those from memory. If you want a source you can look it up, it'll change slightly depending on how you measure them (for example adjusting for PPP). Either way the broad point is that the salary numbers paint the same picture as the wealth numbers you omitted: People aren't dirt poor in Europe and walking on streets of gold in the U.S.
You can compare Spain and Germany to NY and CA, and Mississippi to Romania, and the same pattern holds true.
This is all borne out if you actually go and live in these places for a month or so. Life in the States is hugely comfortable and luxurious compared to everywhere else.
Your thesis is that there is a gigantic gulf between the U.S and the next closest country and that no one else on earth comes even close, I can give you entire countries which are of similar levels of wealth, and many countries with less inequality and higher median wealth (20 in fact).
I've lived and worked all over Europe and in the states, for years, it never struck me that life in the U.S was any more luxurious than in a lot of other European countries.
Your second point does not reflect my experience. The average American simply has more and better stuff and a nicer house.
Edit: my point is not that Europe is some sort of hellhole and that the States have no problems. I’m saying this: the common focus is on GDP per capita or even salaries, but more significant than that is wealth per capita, and the US has the most by a very large margin
To get a better feeling for how things look in terms of the actual humans involved, a median isn't bad, or a percentile based distribution, or you can e.g. cut off the top and bottom 10 or 20% and then do some sort of analysis based on that.
'Mean net worth' is only useful for a very specific set of situations - it's also why you often get charities talking about 'look how tiny the net worth here is' but that includes people with debt having negative net worth, which drags the numbers downwards in just as distortionary a way as the richest people in the US are dragging the numbers you're using upwards.
Of course, it makes great propaganda for the charities, and they're not -strictly- lying - and Credit Suisse aren't lying at all, they're presenting total wealth by country and providing the 'per person' number to help gauge that information, not for use as remotely representitive.
However if you keep scrolling down the document, you'll find Table 2 provides the median - and lo and behold because the mean for the US is skewed by the small (compared to total population) number of extremely rich people, the US in No. 18 by median wealth as opposed to No. 2 by mean.
Statistics are great fun but you do have to be careful to apply the right -sort- of statistics for the purpose you have in mind.
They're often not saying who is being laid off. A bunch of engineers? Sales & marketing? I doubt that any of these companies (besides Amazon) even employ significant amount of low-wage staff, they get those via a staffing agency to avoid benefits and public responsibility for mistreatment.
I can guarantee you no tech writer has made $1 million in salary or compensation in two years.
I assume DO didn't have 11% technical writers. These numbers are hard to judge if you don't know who got laid off.
DO had invested a lot over the last few years into expanding its technical content library as a SEO strategy. They seem to have completely backed out of that investment.
Coyier's $4M exit was nice, sure. Built on 15 years of work, though, alongside his primary job being a developer/designer and CodePen founder who also wrote, not as a full-time writer.
Still standing by my guarantee that no technical writer here got north of $1M of salary or compensation for two years of work. Not even close. If any got north of $500k they're both role models and were probably overpaid for the market.
1: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bphogan_hey-all-a-whole-bunch...