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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I just can’t get over this kind of language coming from people who earn 300k/y.

The idea that facebook developers are “the working class” engaged in a class struggle to overcome oppression is just.. wow way out there! The struggle exists but it’s not at Meta engineering.

EDIT: I’m not saying layoffs aren’t mean/stupid/preventable. I’m only saying that it’s not oppression or class struggle. I can’t understand that people can write this stuff on HN while living in a country where it’s legal to pay restaurant staff below minimum wage cause hey tips amirite. There’s plenty class struggle in America, let alone the world, but not a whole lot of it at Meta.

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This is the narrative that the elite use to divide the working classes. "The people making $300K/yr are not like you!" says the person making $30M/yr to the person making $30K/yr.

The senior software engineer at Meta has far more in common with a blue collar guy living paycheck to paycheck than he has with a CEO whose wealth grows faster than his or her ability to spend it.

I've said this before but the way I see it, almost all of us are N missed paychecks away from bankruptcy. For a lot of people, that N is 1, for some, it's 2 or 3, or even higher if you managed to save wisely. But we all have some number N. And the fact that we have that number should unite us against the few people on the far side of the derivative curve whose N is infinite. Tech workers had their relatively brief moment in the sun where their N was maybe 10-20, it got to our heads a little, and we started thinking we were "very different than a blue-collar worker".

Nobody is getting divided. It’s perfectly possible to be actively in favour of higher minimal wages, social safety nets, universal health care, employment protection rules etc while acknowledging that as a senior software engineer at Meta, you have it very good and are not suffering under any oppression.

The nice explanation is that if you’re doing well, you may be happy to pay lots of taxes so others can do well too.

The selfish explanation is that you want to live in a community with low crime and high trust, which requires a certain baseline living standard for everybody.

Only with the, in my experience uniquely American, idea that people can’t possibly be in against a policy or situation if they’re not immediately short-term personally hurt by it do you need this doublethink that tech staff at Meta are being oppressed.

Just because someone suffers more than someone else does not mean that person suffering less is still not suffering. 300k yr in Silicon Valley with a family and with only one income is peanuts if you want to afford say, childcare that is good and reputable. In relative terms we are all the equivalents of servants to capital and can therefor be considered oppressed. Also your comment wreaks of solipsism: just because you think someone making 300k is in a good placed doesn’t mean they aren’t oppressed in some way by their employer: look at caste issue in the US.

> The senior software engineer at Meta has far more in common with a blue collar guy living paycheck to paycheck than he has with a CEO whose wealth grows faster than his or her ability to spend it.

No. The senior software engineer at Meta and the CEO can both afford a comfortable lifestyle. Yes the CEO can afford a more comfortable lifestyle, but they're still limited by things like health. The blue collar worker earning $30k a year is in a different position entirely.

I know both people who are very rich and people who are poor. The very rich and the senior-engineer types both live comfortable lives. Yes the very rich can have more luxuries if they so desire, but who cares? Not even they do...

The poor live a different life: Freezing winters without heating, 8°C inside their home. No access to warm water. Calculating cost vs calories for food they buy so they get the calories while spending as little as possible.

I mean, people don't like thinking they are part of the problem, that's not horribly surprising.

I don't think it's really surprising that most of tech thinks wealth inequality is not about them while being in the 1%.

Or moving and driving up prices in places with much lower median incomes so they can have a better quality of living.

It's the amorphous, abstract, system you see, not them. They are not part of the problem.

Tbf I disagree that being rich automatically makes you part of the problem. I merely think it disqualifies you from playing the victim card.

Sure. I think that's right - you can be rich and helpful, and rich and unhelpful.

What is happening now seems to be a claim of not being rich at all, which is honestly just weird.

Yep! :-)

300k/year is only 1/3 of the way towards being in the to top 1% for the Bay Area -- https://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/26/13062348/top-one-percent-bay...

>the average one percent household in the larger San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City region makes a whopping $3.5 million plus.

Sure, you can always find a subgroup you are not part of the 1% in, i'm not sure what your point is?

You can also use the average instead of the median, and get a much higher required income for the top 1% :)

The median household (ie entire family) income in the US is 70k. Even in california it's ~100k.

The point was clear - Tech is very wealthy, and believes they are just the random common person.

even if the CEO makes 10,000x more? if you annualize zucks net worth that's where he's sitting, and that ratio actually is pretty comparable to what it was during the lord/serf days.

Wait, if the CEO is rich, 300k/y isn't a living wage? I fail to see the connection.

Context: I live in $NOT_BAY_AREA and the amount of money you folks make while complaining as if you’re an Amazon warehouse worker really rubs me the wrong way. It seems to me that Bay Area tech people (or at least the ones in this thread) lost all sense of reality.

I get that getting fired is stressful but if your skillset is in such high demand as tech skills are in SFBA, it’s not class struggle.

I don’t disagree that layoffs like these are stupid, preventable and maybe even mean, I merely disagree that it’s oppression. It hurts the people who do get oppressed and not paid a living wage.

Just because someone isn't literally starving doesn't mean they aren't being oppressed by the ruling class. How much money do Google and Facebook bring in per employee, and how much of that only goes to the top level people?

All people who sell their labor are in the worker class, period. Pretending that being paid a token amount to feel special and make them see fellow workers as not in the same boat is unhelpful.

Maybe try broadening your perception? The idea that more people are aware of inequality and feel it’s sting doesn’t seem like a clear through line to “hurting people who do get oppressed” if anything my anecdata has found that because of increased feeling of inequality more people I know are supporting strikes of people across pay lines. Maybe the issue here is your judgement not other people’s feelings?

Their neighbors whose median per-capita income is 5 figures seem more relevant of an analogy

The serf analogy makes sense for low-income Americans who essentially have to pay more to the capital class: payday loans, cannot afford bulk discounts due to low cash reserves, rent vs buy, crippling debt, etc

FB white collar workers are literally the capital class, eg, paid in RSUs and LI profiles advertising as angel investors

The only reason I am writing this is it's super disheartening to start the day with seeing engineers not understanding how historically lucky they are, and much more importantly, how rotten the situation is for their neighbors. "Tell me you and your family have never struggled without.."

As a historical note, most Americans are taught enough empathy to not joke about slavery. But guess what: serfdom was happening around the same time, has a lot of violent similarities, and also has descendants who are not thrilled by it. But don't let this distract from my primary point about misunderstanding that technologists are the gentry here, not the serfs, in this terrible analogy.

Eh even those Americans are doing pretty well in the grand scheme. We know that we are importing a bunch of illegal immigrants and using them as manual labor in our disgusting factories and brutal fields. We are not paying them the minimum wage nor giving them any kind of retirement benefits or even the basic human decency of being able to visit their loved ones in the hospital without severe risk. And yet we allow this situation to persist with minimal hand waving dedicated to the issue. If we are going to assign serfdom to anyone surely it would be this invisible class of Americans. Then again, they are here by choice, risking much in the process, because ultimately its a better option for them then they had elsewhere so does it really make sense to even compare these people to the brutality of histories serfdom? Doesn't seem so.

Yes it does. Especially when the class of people you are referring to are fleeing their countries as a result of imperialsm, state led terrorism and ridiculous policies the US itself has instituted throughout the americas. The US is responsible, in many cases, for destabilizing these countries, creating the war on drugs and using adversarial and predatory economics to destabilize these countries for the private ends of capital. Just because you can “choose” to flee does not preclude you from being a victim. Your reading of being a the equivalent of a forced laborer essentially disregards the entirety of history surrounding war, conflict, instability and being a refugee in that context. If the question is about being “forced into working” you’ve already over looked the entire forced labor market that exists at the border and fits your definition of “brutality” quite well.

Your comparison of modern day tech workers to gentry is, in my opinion, surface-level at best. The landed gentry controlled far more of the political processes than your average tech worker does which allowed them to capture leverage, capital and influence at a level we could only dream of. A much more apt comparison would be to todays billionaires who actually control the levers of legislative power and use those levers to make themselves practically untouchable. Just because you feel that people are being spoiled relative to their counterparts doesn’t actually give them real power like the landed gentry had. Just because someone has 200k in a bank account does not immunize them from losing their job, getting sick and losing all of that in medical bills. I’m sorry you’re sad that people feel oppressed but it doesn’t change the fact that people are entitled to feel burned by the wheels of unfettered capitalism. Yesterday it was the car factory workers that were told they were spoiled for advocating for themselves and now we rally behind those causes today so your line in the sand drawing around who is entitled to complain about inequality wreaks of a lack of historical context for how these struggles play out longitudinally.

I'd rather be a tech worker than the landed gentry you mentioned. Would you not?

I’d rather be landed gentry since I think not having to work for a living would be pretty sweet. I’d also have to be cold heartless classist which I don’t think I could do. I’d probably die from dysentery though but I’m considering that outside of the question of “which occupation would you rather”

Where did “which occupation would you rather” make it in? I was comparing the overall lifestyle and life outcomes.

Well your question was vague and not actually what you are referring to: it was a simple “would you rather.” I think the comparison is useless given that comparing the entirety of the life experience of people in two different eras does not actually contribute to a conversation around the core point being made here: having ridiculous levels of wealth is not the same as having a decent paying job in which you are still reliant on the income to survive and therefore are essentially tied to that opportunity of labor. A more valid comparison would be, as I pointed out earlier, between billionaires and any class of people who “have to work for a living”

If you’re able to live in luxury, why does it matter that a small number of people live in much greater luxury?

If you need a paycheck to live then you’re working class. People making 300k/yr have an easier time converting to the capitalist class but they aren’t there by default.

No one making $300,000 a year "needs" a paycheck to "live." This language is so hyperbolic that it limits one's ability to persuade even those audiences that might be sympathetic.

Unless you're claiming that everyone making $300,000 a year could retire immediately, then of course they need a paycheck to live. Maybe you're thinking about the phrase "living paycheck-to-paycheck" which has a different connotation.

Contrast this with a person with many millions or billions in wealth. That person literally does not ever need another paycheck to live. In other words, they do not need to work to live, unlike a typical worker making wages.

> No one making $300,000 a year "needs" a paycheck to "live."

What does that mean?

The 300K is the paycheck (annualized). It's what they use to pay expenses to live. If the paycheck goes away you no longer can pay those expenses.

i.e. of course they need the paycheck to live.

Are you suggesting someone who made 300K once can now retire instantly and never again need a paycheck? It doesn't feel like the above quote is fully thought through.

Now, sure, if they've been making 300K for a couple decades, hopefully they've stashed away enough to eventually retire. But that's a very different statement.

This attitude hurts poorer working class people because it causes high-payed workers to identify themselves with the capitalist class rather than workers.

Are you sure about that? I think recognizing that you’re in the top 1% (and probably top 0.01% globally) is a much healthier way to help underpaid people. It lets you eg advocate for higher minimum wages, social safety nets, higher taxes (that you’re happy to pay, cause hey, lots of money), etc. Earning that much money while pretending to be oppressed seems borderline offensive to me.

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