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