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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

As with previous articles from this source[1], this article contains misleading editorializations: the "pooper scooper" compensation number includes the government's retirement and insurance obligations, and doesn't reflect anywhere close to actual take-home pay[2].

I'm not a SF resident, and have no particular loyalty to it (or any particular interest in defending its municipal policies). But the author (and publication at large) seem to be interested primarily in gleeful portrayals of SF's collapse, with factuality as a distant concern.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35857223

[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol-em...

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In 2018, the SF median household income was $97k [1], which suggests a median individual income of about $76k [2]. An average private-sector employee receives benefits worth 42% of their wages/salary [3]. So a hypothetical median SF worker earning $76k in salary would receive about $32k in benefits, for about $108k total.

So it seems to me that the "pooper scoopers" combined salary+benefits of $184k really is, in fact, extraordinarily high.

(No comment on the rest of the article.)

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/weath-maps-cities-san-franci...

[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... (I took the nationwide ratio of "$71k median household income" to "$56k median individual full-time year-round worker income" and estimated that the same ratio also applied to SF.)

[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm

Yeah gleeful is an apt descriptor for the vibe there. It got non-objective pretty abruptly at the end imho...

> There are tens of thousands of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters of San Francisco drug addicts who likely feel the same way as Berlinn [mother of an addict who disagrees with SF drug policies]. They should be heard, and new policies should be implemented to get drug use off the streets, provide support for those struggling with addiction, and return functionality to a city that lost its bearings so many years ago.

I mean as a frustrated hippie idealist SF native hypocrite I think I totally agree... but thats just like, you know, your opinion man?

Public employees typically receive a larger portion of their total compensation as retirement benefits, than do typical employees at private companies.

Given this difference, it seems like it would be misleading not to quote total compensation.

The misleading nature is the implication that SF's public servants are, on average, taking anywhere close to 200k in TC home.

We can have a conversation about pensions and retirement funding if you'd like, but that isn't mentioned anywhere in the article. Instead, the article moves to imply that city employees are lining their pockets, when they aren't.

Why is the implication misleading? Because there’s a vest period on their total compensation? Isn’t it standard to quote total comp as salary plus equity even if the equity takes years to vest? Why have it be different for a city employee?

> Isn’t it standard to quote total comp as salary plus equity even if the equity takes years to vest?

This isn't how pensions or civil retirement plans work. Contributions during an individual's career result in predictable and proportional fractional payouts after retirement or leaving the civil system.

Again: the implication is that civil servants are somehow making out like bandits here, when 71k take-home is well below the average SF salary[1].

Edit: And to tie a knot around it: no tech job I'm aware of includes the "market" value of their insurance plan or matching schemes in their TC numbers. These would be closer analogues for what's happening here.

[1]: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/-in-San-Francisco,CA

So you’re saying that contributions, which are paid for by the employer, result in predictable and proportional payouts after some vesting period.

I see. So why shouldn’t it be considered a part of total compensation?

The rest of the benefits not being included in TC I agree with.

I realized I made a mistake in this thread: I'm conflating TC and take-home, when my point really only applies to take-home. Sorry for that!

You're right that pension benefits can be reasonably included in a TC calculation; I'd still argue that the article's framing is meant to imply that TC here reflects a larger take-home than it actually does, as well as malfeasance on SF's part (rather than ordinary and boring funding obligations).

Equity belongs to your estate after your death, and will be a permanent obligation of the company (unless it buys back the shares). At best a pension can be partially transferred to your spouse after your death, but after the death of both you, and if you elected the option of a reduced pension to have it apply to your spouse, your spouse, the pension disappears entirely from your estate.

This makes comparing a pension to equity, or even a 401(k), problematic in respects. A pension is an annuity, and should be calculated as such.

TC is TC whether people 'take it home' now or after they retire.

Most people have to save for their retirement, and hope to have enough money to pay for healthcare and living expenses until their final days.

City employees have no such need and don't suffer such uncertainty.

They can retire at 65 and, no matter how long they live, never have to worry about healthcare or living costs.

I'm not aware of any ordinary scenario in which estimated insurance or pension funding obligations are included in compensation figures. The compensation figure you receive from your employer almost certainly doesn't include your insurance costs to them, or your employer's expected costs from matching or other advantaged schemes that you choose to participate in.

For a public employer like the SF, both are at least partially just migrated spreadsheet cells. Neither is directly realizable by the employee, and quoting them in a take-home number only serves to imply otherwise.

Edit: I've realized I've conflated TC and take-home with my second comment in this sub-thread (but not the original comment). You can consider things like pension funding part of TC in a meaningful sense; the larger point about the article's editorialization still stands (since pension funding doesn't change annual take-home numbers).

  I'm not aware of any ordinary scenario in which estimated insurance or pension funding obligations are included in compensation figures.

That's because private companies don't have _estimated_ pension funding obligations. I'm not aware of any private employer in the US which makes job offers that include a defined benefit retirement plan.

They either do some specific % 401(k) match, or they don't. In either case, the % is known and you factor it in as part of your total compensation when you compare employers.

For most private employers, the % they will contribute to your pension is zero or a single digit percentage.

  Neither is directly realizable by the employee

It's realized after retirement, as I said earlier. I don't know whether you genuinely believe that money received after retirement doesn't count, but I think I'll stop repeating myself now :)

> It's realized after retirement, as I said earlier. I don't know whether you genuinely believe that money received after retirement doesn't count, but I think I'll stop repeating myself now :)

It doesn't count in annual take-home. The original article implies (through singling out) that these "poop patrol" employees are somehow being disproportionately enriched, when the reality is that their take-home is ordinary for civil servants in SF (and below the city's average take-home).

Being below the average take-home makes sense, in turn, given that the position is pensioned. But the article makes this staid arrangement sound like graft.

> It's realized after retirement

If any of those funds are being used to fill prior unfunded obligations then they will not be realized by the employee after retirement, but by other civil service retirees. It's typical that the employer will post a single defined percent of salary toward the pension fund for all employees, not a varying percent depending on the expected funding status of each individual employee. This means that if a pension plan isn't fully funded the employer needs to increase this percent for every employee even though the top-up funds are really only going to backstop the pensions of previously hired employees. Yet this top-up percent will be calculated as part of the total "compensation" for the more newly hired employees.

At least I am assuming this is how it works given how the pension works at my employer.

Even if this is true, the (future) top-up for these employees is likely to be higher than today's top-up (for past employees), because people are living longer.

These expectations are calculated into the funding obligation. They may be off, they may be overshoots. The last couple of years life expectancy receded by a couple of years to what it was on average in 1996. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...

At least for the next few years they're unlikely to pay less than is necessary per employee (and in fact pay much more than is necessary). In my job the employer contribution to the pension is about 14% (with the employee contribution about 7% - 9% depending on pension tier), which is making up for a period of time in the late 90s when the contribution was low single digits (IIRC). We're unlikely to see those underfundingly low contribution rates anytime soon.

A pension is an annuity, and should be calculated like annuities when determining the benefit received on a per-employee basis.

> the "pooper scooper" compensation number includes the government's retirement and insurance obligations

Thank you, this is very important information. I believe that for my job a lot of the money being put into the pension on "my" behalf is to cover unfunded obligations taken out for other people long before I had this job. So these payments aren't for my benefit, but for the average benefit of the entire pension fund.

>[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol-em...

Go West, young man!

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