Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> I love the lack of sympathy for tech workers across North America or perhaps even globally, when tech hub salaries still don’t allow tech workers to even have a middle class lifestyle

Do you have empathy for IBs, PEs, and other members of High Finance? The difference in TC between High Finance and the equivalent roles in Tech are not that significant.

Goldman Sach's IB Analysts starting salaries at the SF office were $90k with minimal bonuses in 2020. These same people could have worked at Google or Microsoft (and most of them legitimately had that option)

The overlap between Big Finance and Big Tech is massive, just like the overlap between random engineer and random corpdev drone in Dallas or KC.

View on HN

>Goldman Sach's IB Analysts starting salaries at the SF office were $90k with minimal bonuses in 2020. These same people could have worked at Google or Microsoft (and most of them legitimately had that option)

When I graduated from Columbia in 1999, I interviewed and got offers at various tech startups, but entry-level jobs on the "PM track" for those without a CS/engineering degree didn't formally exist at the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo as far as I know. I had a technical background, but was almost entirely self-taught, and had no interest in writing code for money anyway. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171>

Of my offers I chose Goldman, where I worked with tech companies. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735>

My GS starting salary was 40K. During that first year, because of the dotcom bubble, Goldman raised the salary to $55/65/75K for first/second/third-year analysts, and my end-of-year bonus in 2000 was close to 100% of salary. Then the full effect of the recession/market crash hit and the 2001 bonus was, well, much smaller.

> the 2001 bonus was, well, much smaller

Exactly!

The bonus plays a massive role in Analyst compensation, and during 2020-present, the bonus was slashed severely due to a lack of late stage dealflow.

The work hours at GS and JPM were still as crappy as before, but the bonuses were trash when factoring stock and bonus compensation their peers were getting.

A bunch of my mentees made the switch to PM, SWE, VC analyst, or Founding explicitly because of that.

I have empathy for anyone who is trying to make ends meet, whatever that means. Why wouldn't I have empathy for those people?

Absolutely, all for working class solidarity.

With that said, I think most people recognize that there are some jobs where the goal is to make maximal money first, morals second. Like, oil executives for example I think most people would agree don't have the benefit of the doubt that they were just trying to make an honest living.

Its a sliding scale, and for some people I think 'tech bros' end up on the greedy / immoral side. I know that for me at least, anytime I'm outside of a tech hub, the response to saying that I'm a software developer is often 'oh . . .'

In my short lifetime computer nerds have gone from losers worth making fun of, to rockstars making gobs of cash, to villains ruining whatever place they live or hobby they take up. Pretty wild.

I just like programming computers.

me too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com