Hacker News Reader

Comment by KRAKRISMOTT | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure where you are from but 600k a year is not that much. That's a staff engineer at a well capitalized unicorn. You can reach there within or under a decade. In places like Cali, half of your money goes to taxes. Unless that 600k is in dividends/capital gains, you get diminishing returns the more you make. It's solidly upper middle class, but the elite class ceiling is very high when you have founders making 9 figure exits in low interest rate environments.

(Downvoters can go suck on their sour grapes, if you aren't negotiating a total compensation in line with the value you are creating, that's not my problem. You are in an industry that generates disproportionately large returns per individual contributor and the fact that you don't know how to capture the value of your own labor is entirely on you. Spend less time practicing leetcode and more time on learning business).

View on HN

Everyone wants to call themselves middle class. $60,000 a year? Middle class. $600,000 a year? Upper middle class.

Where is the lower class? Where is the upper class?

I swear people on this site making >$500,000 a year act poorer than my family members making $90,000.

I’m under the impression that “middle class” vs “working class” and “upper class” was conventionally more about labor relations.

If you derive your income from ownership, you are upper class. If you derive it from the value of your work work, you are working class. In between we have a class of people with high-value professions and/or assets such that they are basically able to make their own employment decisions without any real discomfort. Merchants I think were the go-to historical example, I’d put highly paid contractors in that class nowadays. This class is literally the class in between the of the other two, aka the middle class.

If you own a company that employs people, you are upper class.

If the boss (maybe the person contracting you) asks you to do something unethical or dangerous and you tell them to get bent with 0 worry as to your next paycheck, you are middle class.

If the former scenario happens and you consider doing the bad thing because you’d rather not be homeless, you are working class and should probably think about forming a union or something.

Depending on your expenses, you could be middle class at 90k and working class at 600k, but if I was working class at 600k… I’d look into getting my expenses under control…

Often in the US we say “middle class” when we actually mean “median income.” It isn’t great.

While I like the distinction between working and owning class, i think your given distinction for upper class is really bad.

"If you own a company that employs people, you are upper class."

Tons of people own companies where they employ people, but still put in 50 hour work weeks and bring home less than $100,000 a year (or worse) without growing the company's value. In this discussion's context, I would put the staff engineer making $600,000 way ahead.

Owning cash is still asset ownership. Owning a failing business is not necessary better than owning hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus, owning stock is still business ownership.

The quantity of ownership is important, otherwise any American with an invested 401k is part of the owning class.

I prefer the distinction of: "If you need to work to live, you are the working class". Though even that falls apart when talking strictly about income, as different people use their money differently. One person may turn $200,000 salary into early retirement while another lives paycheck to paycheck until death.

Hmm, yeah I take it that the description is not perfect there.

That said, I’m not sure how to fix it. The point really is that it isn’t a better vs worse score or something. Hypothetically the staff engineer could be blowing that $600k on… I dunno, I can’t imagine how to waste $600k a year, boats I guess, and not end up with the assets.

It is definitely an extreme case, though.

The post tax amount is only slightly more than twice what your family members make, especially if they live in low tax states. It doesn't go very far in expensive states. A slightly nicer car, a somewhat bigger house, and perhaps a few years earlier retirement. It hardly qualifies as elite by any means of the word.

Brother, all of the numbers are pre-tax. People making $90,000 a year pay tax too. It's going to be more than 3 times the take home.

I didn't say it makes them elite. Nowhere did I even use the word. But these two salaries don't fall into the same bucket called "middle class". The elites aren't working jobs for money.

and what percentage of software developers are "staff engineers at well capitalized unicorns"?

0.01% of all developers?

Whatever the number is, that is firmly in the "elite" side of the distribution

I think you will find the downvotes aren't envy, but incredulity that you think $600k is anything but wealthy.

https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...

What is considered a middle class income?

In 2022, middle class encompasses household income from $35,090.50 to $140,362.00. This measure of middle class uses the range from half of median household income to twice the median household income.

Making over 600k is great but you are probably not wealthy.

First, once you make over like 150k, your federal tax bracket goes into 30%+ and closer to 40%. And you probably live in NY or CA so it's more like 50% with state and local. So it may look like someone makes 200k more than you do (or whatever) but half of that difference right away goes to taxes.

Second, making that much money generally allows you to live in a nicer area but not not have an extravagant life in that area. Case in point, a small 4 bedroom house in the suburbs of NY is like 1.5 mil nowadays. The same house in a suburb of Cleveland might be like 250k. 6x difference in housing cost. So it doesn't make sense to compare the 600k to the 140k and say "wow that's so much above the average middle class" because they don't face the same costs.

And by the way you end up paying like 35k in taxes on that house in NY.

Don't get me wrong, 600k is a great income for a household and especially an individual. Just that most people who make that still live what looks like a middle class life just slightly nicer, in a better area and hopefully with some savings.

600K is the amount a redneck can pull working in the oil field in upper management. It is by no means "wealthy" unless you are in the Midwest or working as a white collar paper pusher in a field that doesn't pay well. It is high compared to a Starbucks barista perhaps but go to places like New York and Boston and the Bay Area level of salaries hardly stand out.

You can make 600k a year running small businesses like online tutoring too. Too many people (especially in tech) get overly caught up with hype and passion projects and refuse to put in the effort to remain dynamic and keep up with advances in their industry. If LLMs are the latest thing, go learn how the engineering and science side of language models work before launching yet another side project without doing any market research. Sure it's an empirical field, but you can learn a lot from simply replicating paper results. Drop that React tutorial and learn how variational learning works. Train and fine-tune a model yourself. Don't just blindly call an API and build products on undifferentiated factors like prompt engineering.

The writing's on the wall right now that machine learning engineering is what the industry will be embracing in the next 3 years. It may be partly hype, but it is obvious that there is immense value to be captured.

> upper management

I other words, elite. Nothing to do with the middle.

“It’s people like you what causes unrest”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com