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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

Arguably one can't be a leftist when making SF tech salaries either. A casual check of an L5 at Google (as a representative example; they do have an office in SF) says their total comp. is about $413k, putting them in the labor aristocracy or at least in the "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" type of leftist.

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Why shouldn't an employee at one of the world's most profitable companies be paid well? Should they work for less so that the company can profit more and they can somehow prove a point?

Indeed. Arguably, a true Marxist would say that $413k/year is underpaid. The average profit-per-employee at Google is $1.95M/year, and the Marxist ideal of cooperative ownership prescribes that workers deserve a larger share of that than $413k.

The total profit of Google would probably drop if the company was radically "re-organized" like that.

The true Marxist would be trying to demolish Google and other tech companies and their unreasonably outsized profits as being unfair to workers as a class. But unsurprisingly, people are interpreting it in a way so that they can continue to rake in a gloriously fat paycheck and live a lavish lifestyle. In a peoples' revolution, they'd get what the kulaks got.

The fact that articles like the one submitted are increasing should alert you that the working poor do not see overpaid techbros as on their side, no matter how much they claim they are.

I've always felt like tech workers view themselves as a modern-day petite-bourgeoisie, and this is why the industry has been so successful at keeping out the unions.

As an aside, I had friends who had to declare bankruptcy during DotCom 1.0 because of stock options and the Alternative Minimum Tax. This could have been fixed with legislation but it always seemed like the DC inside-the-beltway crowd saw the whole thing as class treachery and refused to intervene.

> The fact that articles like the one submitted are increasing should alert you that the working poor do not see overpaid techbros as on their side, no matter how much they claim they are.

What I can’t square is why they (probably correctly) don’t see overpaid techbros as on their side, but they do see their bosses, and others even more alienated from their lives and struggles as in their side.

IMO, one side is openly condescending ("learn to code" / "voting against their own best interests"(sic)) and insulting (e.g. religion) to them on top of not helping them. The other side doesn't help either but at least pretends to listen to their grievances and says things to make them feel powerful. When you're struggling and miserable, a little sympathy goes a long way; far enough to put some very bad people in the White House unfortunately.

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