Lets call it what it is. One side is literally trying to kill the other. Whether you choke off oxygen or financial means to survival... you're killing people.
One side is wealthy enough to engage in this for fun and entertainment. They are so disconnected from reality that their actions are justified and their ethics totally evaporated.
How long till we conduct layoffs by allowing CEOs to meander open-floor offices and simply execute the employees they see as disposable?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658410
I doubt this will get the engagement my flagged comment got, but let me know what you think.
Don't fool yourself: Software engineers are working class.
Instead of scrapping with someone who makes twice your wage for half your work, we should all be scrapping with those who own the capital, who are profiting from our labour, who even allow for such crappy jobs in the first place. We should ALL be paid well and have respectful work accommodations.
And that investment is the capital for someone else's business.
And you don't have a large surplus at that salary, you are also a fool.
If you want to talk about income levels, "working class" isn't a term you should be using; it's too big of a bucket.
Do you not work, just get your income from investments and portfolios? Then you aren't working class.
Hedgies are trying to take a cut of both of their wages so they can buy more cocaine.
Obviously theyd prefer us to think we're special little creative snowflakes who don't need union membership like a common old factory workers. Or Tom Cruise. Or the hollywood writers who just won a massive victory.
You guys in your nice offices with catered lunches, free drinks, unlimited sick time, RSUs, bonuses, etc?
That isn’t working class. Thats the 1% from where I sit.
Your perception doesn't agree with reality. First of all, you need to earn at least double that to qualify for 1%. But that's a different story, as income is not what makes someone 'working class'. If you MUST work in order to survive, you are working class, which is the case even for people making $400k/year.
> catered lunches, free drinks, unlimited sick time, RSUs, bonuses, etc
You're kind of working against your argument here. These things disappear when you lose your job, hence they need to work in order to have them, hence they're working class.
If you need someone to direct your anger towards, it's the people with trust funds, not the W2 workers who are making more than you. Think of it this way. Who benefits the most if your income goes down or stagnates? Other W2 workers? Or someone else who just loves it when you direct your energy against other workers?
You're responsible as well, for supporting the infrastructure enabling these efforts.
But don't conflate issues. We were talking about whether or not someone working at BigCo making $400k/year is working class or not. They are, even if they're not blue-collar workers.
I don't really give a damn who or what you're literally angry about, I was just using a figure of speech.
$65k is the middle of "middle class".
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...
See section 2. The trend is pretty clear: The upper class is transferring wealth from the middle class. So, demanding that firms cut wages on middle class workers has been standard practice for decades. They're running out of money to extract from there, so they're going after the bottom half of the uppe class next.
I suggest joining a startup; investors that are willing to put cash into companies in times like this end up getting outsized returns on investment (since anyone that can leave the big companies does, the big company's R&D projects get cancelled during downturns, and general morale issues prevent minor product improvements from shipping).
(Also, median of middle class is $90K, and median of upper is $219K. Lower class is $29K. If they broke upper class into 2-4 separate tiers, there'd also be a clear skew in wage growth toward the top of the upper class.)
Older people, pre-retirement, generally earn more then younger people. As it should be - they've spent their lives growing their net worth and gaining experience.
Most "class warfare" can be explained by this - except that it doesn't get clickbait outrage reaction to say "older, experienced people are wealthier than young people starting their careers".
It's much more exciting to skew charts and graphs to show massive wealth disparity, as if there's a sinister cabal of wealthy folks that for some reason don't want others to succeed.
These charts are utterly meaningless if they aren't broken down by age group. You're putting someone who has 30+ years of career growth against someone out of high school and then screaming about wealth disparity.
The article itself even points this out - they say most of the loss of money in middle income was made up for in the 45-65 year old bracket. After 65 (surprise) when folks are retired, this drops off.
The issue isn't some sort of "class warfare" boogeyman. The issue is that we've made it damn near impossible to have a large family these days, and our population demographics are reflecting that, along with income.
Also note: the article doesn't talk about absolute numbers or wealth. It's all percentile stuff. It's easy to play statistics tricks with that.
As I commented somewhere else, if you are making 400k a year and are not investing the surplus income as capital for someone else's business then you are probably not making good life decisions. You certainly are making enough to be a rentier
Somebody in the labor class making that kind of money may be able to springboard themselves into the capital class by investment, but they aren't automatically there based solely on their income.
This further division of the working class into upper and lower classes based on income is just another method to implement divide-and-conquer by pitting workers against themselves. Yes, software engineers earn a lot more than other salaried professions, it does not mean that software engineers control the means of production. Until a salaried worker earn enough to become part of the capital class and not need to work anymore we are all part of the working class.
Blue-collar/lower income workers might take offense in that, as they'd look at someone making US$200-400k/year as part of the elite, it does not mean that workers earning that shouldn't look at themselves as they are: workers, subjected to an elite class controlling the means of production and hence, their lives.
I was making 400k/year at one time, I also had a few million dollars (that I earned by being "working class" in SV) invested in the S&P500. Which is why your argument has no merit. I could have stopped being "working class" with a 400k/year salary any time I wanted and lived from my investments but I didn't.
I kept being "working class" in SV and I ended up growing my compensation package to nearly 1 million dollars a year. That's what being "working class" in SV can amount to. But please try to convince me that I should take to the streets with my working-class brethren that work at Starbucks because I'm being exploited by the elites.
> Which is why your argument has no merit. I could have stopped being "working class" with a 400k/year salary any time I wanted and lived from my investments but I didn't.
You owned capital investments that kept you comfortable without the need to be exploited, at that point you crossed the class division from worker to a capitalist. You said it yourself...
I picked the 200-400k range because it's been thrown around on this thread, that compensation is far away for most of SWEs in the world. Of course if you earn that and invest (and thus becoming a capitalist) you can be free from exploitation. Most workers, even SWEs, in the world cannot cross that chasm.
You are a capitalist, not working class. You just choose to work.
Then its a meaningless phrase
Do you depend on an employer to afford your life? If you got disabled and couldn't work a single day again in your life, would you be able to afford it without stress? There it is, that's the meaning of "you depend on salary"...
Edit: I also noticed that usually your comments don't really add much to discussions on HN, could you change that behaviour a little bit, please?
Long-term disability insurance has nothing to do with whether you are an owner or a worker, but whether you make enough money to afford the insurance premium - - and you can earn that money either by salary or dividends (and their proxies).
This is not the point I'm making.
> Long-term disability insurance has nothing to do with whether you are an owner or a worker, but whether you make enough money to afford the insurance premium - - and you can earn that money either by salary or dividends (and their proxies).
Of course you can buy insurance, again, this is not the point I'm making, it's an analogy to the point of: do you depend on someone employing you, and paying you, to live (and have a meaningful life somehow)? You can only pay insurance if you are earning money, usually through a salary...
You're the one trying to divide and conquer by pushing an abstract, out of touch political ideology that has resulted in the deaths of millions
>Edit: I also noticed that usually your comments don't really add much to discussions on HN, could you change that behaviour a little bit, please?
Right back at you comrade!
You might be able to make a compelling argument that, as the people pushing that automation forward, high-paid software developers are class traitors, like cops. But cops are still working class, even if they're being paid to betray their own and others in their class's interests.
They won't but the software engineer should identify with the plights of the worker making 40k. That's the issue, quite a lot of SWEs and other high income professions see themselves as separate from the working class.
> You're the one trying to divide and conquer by pushing an abstract, out of touch political ideology that has resulted in the deaths of millions
I'm not pushing socialism, talking about class warfare does not mean I'm a communist, stop that line of thinking as you are assuming something I have not said. At no point in my comments I've mentioned communism or socialism, I use their terms since it's a good analysis of the powers of capital, that's all. This knee-jerk reaction to some terms is absolutely ridiculous and taints your comment, from that you derived I'm somehow a communist and your only retort is talking about "the deaths of millions" caused by it. Capitalism has also contributed to the death and injury of hundreds of millions. That's not the fucking point...
> Right back at you comrade!
"No, you" stops being a retort you can use by 4th grade, again I insist: be a better contributor to discussions, so far you haven't done much.
Even people making 400K are still working class.
Now between the working class, there’s a lot of difference too. The thing is, that difference is on an entirely different scale than the difference between the working class and the owner class.
That’s a silly distinction for what “working class” is.
The layoffs affected recruiters, marketing, sales, and a ton of areas that were not engineers. Lower level engineers were also targeted more than the higher level engineers, and even more importantly the hiring freezes and reductions blocked a ton of new grads from getting jobs.
As a 400k/year engineer I was fine. My colleagues unfortunately were not.
A couple thousand at the top don't represent all of us.
We need to unionize, the sooner the better.
Here's what $100k is depending on where your perception of money is anchored.
Baby Boomeer: $100k would have been $12k when you were growing up.
Gen X: That's about $35k
Millennials: That's about $63k
I don't know what point you thought you were making. In the very least, middle class is still a class.
Also in theory, pensioners and the insured are the beneficiaries of hedge fund profits via their institutions investments. But nobody is policing the thoughts of the fund managers.
In theory. In reality, higher salary workers are easier to propagandize, because they have a tendency to LARP "being a capitalist" with their 401k. They also tend to be modestly smart technicians, which generally gives them a greater capacity for self-deception and delusion. The end result is that most of them politically self-neutralize.
It is the inverse of minimum wage increases putting upward pressure on incomes above them.
That is one reason why solidarity works.
> Class warfare against those making $400k/year...
IIRC, if your income comes from wages or salary, you're part of the working class. It doesn't matter how much you make. Wall Street wants to kick your ass to the curb and replace you with a robot just the same as a dude working in a factory.
However, when people make salaries that high, they often confuse themselves for capitalists.
If a large majority of your income comes from selling your labor for a wage, you are working class.
Lower/middle/upper are mostly arbitrary definitions to divide and conquer the working class as a whole. And it works.
It is your choice!
Spoils of war? Cost of doing business? What excuses are we using to discard ethics today?
In the end, it really comes down to what you think a stock corporation is for. If it is some sort of profit maximizer, then cost control is part of running it.
If a CEO is rewarded handsomely for tricking / deceiving a large population of his employees (at the expense of the employees, benefit enjoyed exclusively by company) should this now be seen as an accepted business practice? How slippery do we have to get this slope before it just turns into a meat grinder where all issues ethical or otherwise uncomfortable are just hand-waved away into "but it's profitable!" sausage?
How is the financial performance unrelated to how a firm treats employees? People choose their employers in a fair number of situations.
> People choose their employers in a fair number of situations.
When was the last time you were out of work? Have you ever been let go from a job for reasons completely disconnected from your performance?
I think the idea that people are able to "vote with their feet" is a capitalist fantasy told by the ruling class. The actual opportunity on the ground is much lower and you often have to compromise your values, ethics and morals to pay the bills.
Of course if you make enough money it's easy to insulate yourself from the things us dirty peasants concern ourselves with, so I can understand if you don't get it.
I would agree with the notion that by far not everyone has real choice, hence organized labour as one defense. Reality is, some firms care much more than others, not all run by greedy psychopaths in my experience.
If you want total freedom on what you do then can only do things that don't need clients/customers, though. Some compromise is somewhere is likely.
Not to mention people whose salaries are 3x, 4x, 5x or even more than the median wage attempting to LARP as the oppressed proletariat is cringe inducing as heck. If all out class warfare broke out, the proletariat knows darned well that we're not feeling anything like the financial pain that they've endured. We'd be treated as enemies just as much as the wealthy and it's much, much easier for a mob to get their hands on you and I than it is for the truly wealthy.
I think from a "do we care about the people we employ" perspective the whole idea of laying people off and then hiring them back is callous at best, and psychopathic / sociopathic at worst. The conditions these actions create at the companies people are employed at are toxic and negative.
I've never had a 400k salary, I've barely cracked six figures. The reality is that the class war actions taken have decimated the middle and lower end of the tech job market and people like me are just plain fucked with little options other than burger king when you get done doom scrolling the same 10 job boards every day. It doesn't matter if you've done DBA or are a competent developer with real world experience, once you get kicked down the ladder you are black-marked for life. Good luck getting back up when the ladder has been set on fire and the ashes dropped on your head.
What policies are you actually proposing? Because I really don't know where you're going with this. Ban firing? Forced hiring?