A reasonably levelled FAANG engineer working a 9-5 is absolutely rich by any objective standard. Applies to plenty of other industries as well.
I am a "reasonably leveled FAANG eng" in Canada.
I have enough money to do the following:
- rent a 2 bedroom apartment in a smaller city.
- Order food from time to time.
Things that are difficult to afford:
- Any level of a car (currently car share). - I don't even look at house prices almost anywhere in my province.
My effective tax rate is around 48% and with the way things keep increasing in price I will likely never own a home.
Returning to the original question .... Am I rich?
By world standards you are certainly very rich, but probably even for Canada yes, you are rich.
Not sure if you're Canadian. But in case you're not most of Canadians net worth are tied up in housing that had been exploding in price the past few decades.
For most normal jobs what you make is pretty irrelevant compared to what do you own.
Many older teachers in Canada are far far richer than the equivalent of senior / staff SWEs.
Canada has become a very difficult place to "earn" your way to becoming "rich" without inherited wealth.
I think your definition of rich might be much closer to ... Maybe middle class (definitely not upper middle class).
In addition to this I grew up in objective poverty by Canadian standards so I'm not sure what you are on about.
It's often hard for people to truly grasp how utterly poor the vast majority of the population is. This also leads the wealthy to be confused as to why tech workers are often so hated and also envied in the general population. Essentially we are the rich, meanwhile we pretend we are somehow "average" simply because we only look at those very few people even richer than us.
For the actual average person these conversations are wealthy people complaining that they are not as wealthy as other wealthy people. I don't blame them for having no sympathy. Then you get articles and comments talking about the "end of in person work" pretending as though the majority of people who will never work from home because their jobs are such that they cannot are somehow simply not even people. It's not a good look.
Additionally I don't think most people on HN know what it's like to come from generational poverty.
Having to take out bad loans when you are young to afford basics.
Having parents leave / die early.
Having to take care of elderly / sick relatives who can't afford to take care of themselves.
Just getting a "high paying" job does not automatically erase all those things and make you rich.
It's a fact that the majority of tech workers are the rich. They are simply not satisfied with what they have and want even more, exactly what they accuse the 1% of. But to the 95% you and the 1% are both the enemy.
>- Any level of a car (currently car share).
>My effective tax rate is around 48%
I have a hard time believing this. Assuming you live in Ontario, the most populous province, 48% marginal rate translates to an income of at least $165k/yr. That works out to a take-home of $102k/year, or $8498/month. With that much money I don't see how it's "difficult to afford" a car. Even we assume you live in Toronto (ie. not a "smaller city") and pay $3000/month for a 2 bedroom, that still leaves you with nearly $5.5k to play with.
All of this assumes a single earner household. If you have a partner contributing income as well, I don't see how you can't also afford to buy an apartment after a few years of saving.
I'm closer to 100k, my SO own a business and make very little money. I rent a 2 bedrooms apartments close to Montreal, I order food regularly, own a Volt and I am currently looking at house 30 minutes away from Montreal. It's much cheaper than elsewhere in Canada though,
[1] https://www.rcgt.com/app/uploads/2023/03/individual_taxation...
With that being said I did miss speak. It's 42% effective tax rate (with nearly 0 back on tax return)
I can say I definitely dont make anywhere near 400k and idk if you know but Ontario is crazy expensive for everything
However, FAANG really exploded in size only recently (and then hit layoffs), FAANG jobs are concentrated in VHCOL locations, so savings aren’t great for all. So while their W2 may look impressive, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that they are “rich”.
To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5. That doesn’t describe the vast majority of FAANG (or otherwise) employees. There certainly are outliers and success stories, but it’s not the default case.
Perhaps this is a good example of the uselessness of the term “rich” when used absolutely because I would never interpret the word that way and we’d be talking past each other in any discussion!
Anyways, I dont get your point. Rich people work ALOT! More for sure than 9-5 usually but they work. You seem to be confusing rich with "independently wealthy", aka: I inherited a large sum of money from my father Sam Walton, etc.
FAANG people are absolutely rich compared to anyone else and easily make the 1%. Think about that: out of 100 people do they make more than the other 99 people that work in cafes and Amazon warehouses?
The answer is yes.
Or
“According to recent studies, to be in the top 1% of earners in the U.S., you need to bring in an annual salary of at least $597,815. This means that the other 99% of earners in the U.S. make less than this amount per year. When it comes to net worth, the top 1% of Americans have a minimum net worth of around $11.1 million.”
Even within FAANG, most people won’t be coming near that
[0] https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa... [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/a...
The best I can do is: you're rich if you don't have to work to maintain your lifestyle. Anything else is going to be relative to some arbitrary evaluation scheme.
You can adjust those percents I suppose, but yes there is an objective standard for being rich and it depends on where you fit in the income and assets scale.
You can make a lot of money and still be poor if you spend all of it supporting a dependent with expensive healthcare needs, for instance.
Rich people don’t call themselves rich. It’s all relative. Director at Google doesn’t feel rich. Neither does the nurse who makes $90K in a town where most of their friends make $35K or the two teacher couple who brings in $200K working in Redwood City.
I don’t think absolute terms like “rich” really help much in these discussions anyway. What is “rich”? I’d argue that people working 9-5 in an office are on average richer than the average retail employee by a fair margin even if they’re poorer than a CEO. It certainly feels a lot more relevant to the discussion at hand.
For what it's worth, my definition of rich has always been somebody who doesn't have to work. Having you and your family's livelihood dependent on the whims of an organization you don't have any control over is pretty daunting if you stop to think about it.