Software developers are just getting the kind of relative pay and conditions improvements that a much larger number of people took for granted in the 60s and 70s. It's everyone else who is fucked.
We enrich "business guys" with connections to billion dollar exits while we ourselves make middle-class or slightly upper-middle class wages. Meanwhile anyone willing to take out the loans to put themselves through Dental school will eventually make more than we do and if they have the motivation to open up their own practice, much more than we do.
Even if you are the sole earner in your household, it is still unlikely that you make less than $62,500. If you do make less than that, ask for a raise. If you don't make less than that, or your combined household income is more than that, you are a member of the upper class, and you should try and remember your privilege. (Hey, life's not so bad.)
Additionally, tying class tightly to income is nonsense, because it ignores people with significant wealth but little income and ignores the different socioeconomic climates across the US.
They might not have the glut of "hot" startups that Silicon Valley does, but they have much more reasonable cost of living.
Elite workers are still workers. The people who receive most of the wealth created by workers are capitalists, not workers. There's a fairly strong ideology dedicated to preserving that state, with a name that makes that orientation quite clear.
Personally, I've done both the entrepreneur and employee route, and I created and kept a whole lot more money as an employee. I may go back to being an entrepreneur in the future - I'm certainly a lot more skilled than the last time I tried it - but the experience of founding my own startup and working 5 years in a big company has taught me a whole lot about the value that other job functions create, like sales, design, management, finance, capital, etc. It's really easy to look at your output as a software developer and say "I built the thing that makes my company hundreds of millions of dollars, and I only get to see hundreds of thousands of it", without realizing that none of that hundreds of millions in value would've been created without marketing to understand what people want, product design to understand how to supply it, UX to make it usable, sales to let people know about it, management to make all these functions work together, or finance to pay for it.
Or you know, you'll get an inflated idea of how much you "actually" created, just because you get to tell people what to do, and belittle their contributions because, after all you are in charge.
Developers sometimes get big heads because there is so much dead weight in the corporate world pulling paychecks for bullshit. I get that we build stuff that creates real tangible value. But just as people sometimes misunderstand the challenge of our work and the value that we bring to the table, it's easy to dismiss business-oriented entrepreneurs as just being privileged or having inside connections—all of which may be true, but until you have the stones to go put everything on the line and found your own company you don't have a leg to stand in terms of proclaiming who is bringing what value. Without the founder, nothing happens, period.
What you get as a developer in the bay area is way better than other US cities.
I've lived in a couple of those places over the course of a decade and a half, and I can tell you that while the cost of living is lower there, so also is the pay. Significantly lower.
You figure in the relative scarcity of jobs, and you're looking at making a lot less, limited carrier mobility, and real stress when layoffs invariably roll around.
Sure, I can't buy a house here, but I certainly make a lot more than I spend and I stock that extra away. This creates something many people don't have: options.
Options like:
Being picky about jobs. Starting something on your own. Buying a house with cash somewhere else if you decide to move.
These are hard to replace outside of this bubble many of us live in.
But when I poke at other markets, with very few exceptions the pay differential for web developers is so steep and the choices are so few it's startling. (And I'm also frequently reminded how much of the rest of the United States is still populated by Microsoft shops rather than living in OSX/Unix-land like I do.) This is why I ended up moving out here in the first place a decade ago from the Tampa Bay area -- I was a Unix-head in a land of very few opportunities, and to my dismay, that really hasn't changed very much.
It's hard not to notice that a lot of the HN crowd that takes mobility for granted are people who co-founded their own startups and/or work at companies with a strong telecommuting culture. I think that's awesome, but finding such roles is not as easy -- even out here -- as I think people who've found them sometimes believe. (And I say that as someone who's primarily worked from home since 2011.)
Boston is even worse, the available real estate is all older and smaller and nearly as expensive as SF. I'd say feature for feature your money probably goes further in SF than in Boston.
The suburbs also have developer jobs.
But we shouldn't have to be flexible with an hour commute on a train while at the same time being told we live a life of luxury and are over paid. It appears to me the cognitive dissonance going on here similar to the SF people who say "It's not so bad, I found a studio for 2k/month in Oakland!"
If we were truly overpaid and in such demand we wouldn't live in crappy studios or be priced out of the neighborhoods we work in.
The point is, you have the luxury of being able to make those choices. What about the people who sweep the floors in your office? What about the people who work at the trendy cafe where you eat lunch?
I guess it's a Chicago thing.
There are "well-paid" software jobs there, if one adheres strictly to a comparison of salaries with the median. However the quantity of software jobs is lower, the type of software job is generally slanted toward the "crappy" end of the spectrum (software developers are an expense, and therefore to be treated as enemies to the mission of the company), and the pay is just not even in the same ballpark as the Bay area, even if it is (relatively) good.
Then there are other factors, such as quality of life, public services and other things that make it easier or even pleasant to raise a family. In Florida all these things, in my opinion, are seriously lacking or underwhelming. Coupled with the high level of job insecurity there, I didn't have to think too long or hard to decide to move my family from there to the Bay area.
> A software developer might be able to do these things in
> California, but only barely, unless they have a very cushy
> arrangement or they've ridden an exit for a startup.
What does this even mean? Median 33%? Median is 50% How can it have a range? Are you saying the 33th percentile household income in the US ranges from 30k to 62.5k depending on the state?
(Or so. I understand the data)
They are also the 2nd and 4th sextiles, on either side of the median, which is the 3rd sextile, and approximately the same as the 33rd and 66th percentiles, or the 333rd and 666th permille.
Income is not a normal distribution, so the two numbers don't tell much of a story by themselves. Usually, the statistics are shown as quintiles, plus median, 95th percentile, and maybe also 99th percentile and 999th permille, depending on whether the statistics presenter wants the audience to gasp or not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
And dont you need a First from a good university to stand a good chance of high paying job in SV?
100k in the bay area is just middle class, no upper qualification. Very unlikely to afford a home within 25 minutes of work unless they're in the south bay.
You need 200k total household income before a mortgage on a $1.3mm house (starter home cost in most neighborhoods) is realistic.
There is a 10x difference in the cost of a home in SF and Austin (where I just moved to from SF) and a 20x difference between SF and where my father lives in Ohio.
There is not a 20x difference in income between developers and the 30-60k US median. The medianites live out in the sticks where their mortgage is $150-600 a month.
Only in SF do you have people complaining that they are "middle class" because they can't afford a single family home (already a luxury in major US cities) in a ritzy neighborhood and have to suffer through a >25 min commute.
Houses in SF on the edge of the ritzy neighborhoods cost $700k. But that's not living the american dream right
This model is extremely rough and inaccurate, but is a step in the right direction. The main problem it has is to assume that there has to be only 3 classes, which is arbitrary and does not describe the actual lives of real people. A second, related defect is that it does not recognize the existence of a small group of very vulnerable people below the "working poor".
For these reasons, I think it is best to model this clustering classification using a log-normal distribution, with at least five classes (Underclass < Working poor < Middle class < Upper-middle class < Upper class). Still, the "upper class" category lumps together the merely wealthy (smallish business owners, the most successful professionals) with the extremely rich, and all possibilities in-between.
It also lumps in the high-income earners with the high-net worth people (the ones everyone thinks of when they say "rich").
I would argue that wealth is a better measure of class than income anyway. There is an inflection point on the wealth curve, which (when you cross it) all you need to is not screw up really badly, and you will be wealthy for the rest of your life.
Every technology startup that blows up have people with engineering backgrounds in positions of senior management. Across levels of seniority, engineers often make as much or more money as their non-technical counterparts. If you want to stay at the individual contributor level as an engineer that is, of course, totally fine, but you should compare yourself to other IC's in the organization without technical skills. I think you will find yourself to be very well positioned financially.
Non-payers are part of their expected business, maybe someone fresh out of school who never talked to another practicing dentist might get surprised by this.
They hire people to chase down non paying clients and they still turn a hefty profit.
Yes, dentistry is a luxury
Your blithe comment implies that this is reasonable, I strongly disagree.
In any case, we're not talking about something irrefutable, like a law of physics. Income inequality has been on the rise in the US since the 70's and is, possibly, one of the causes contributing to the shrinking of the middle class.[0]
I am not advocating that anyone gets anything for free, rather that the majority of the employed receive equitable pay. The current distribution, were a nearly obscene amount is squeezed towards the top of the organization, is unsustainable and, I would argue, unhealthy for the economy.
Again, to reiterate, I am not arguing that the managers should no longer be paid or that they should make less than those they manage. I'm simply pointing out that, at present, the top tiers of management are making far too much and this effects the income of everyone further down the ladder.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United...
Real wages are below their early 70s peak by about 14% right now.
By my calculation that puts an average programmer in a considerably better position than most people would have been seeing even in the early 70s.
We have luxurious jobs.
That's not to say we don't earn it, just that any suggestion that we're not well off both relative to the average and relative to any point in history doesn't stack up.
The US and Australia pay far more. I basically had to go contract when I got back here so that I could match the money.
I live in Glasgow. Our sysadmin moved to Australia (Sydney) - close to tripled his salary but dropped his standard of living because of higher costs out there. I hear that a lot from people moving out there - great salaries, costs a fortune to live.
Houses are pokey and weird over here after that...
And considering the value developers bring to companies, and comparing our salaries to other positions, developers in general are underpaid. It's perfectly reasonable to demand more perks.
But I guess this is why we have a lower class: to keep the worker bees on their toes. "See how good you have it? You could end up like one of them."
And really, not all developers are mentally taxed for 8 hours a day. Some might do routine tasks for 2 or hours and then browse HN for the remaining 6, or just go right home. The labor market for developers is no where near efficient in this regard.
But really, if a high salary and benefits and perks aren't a luxury job, then what is a luxury job exactly?
There are some people in this world that are working in their job because of circumstances beyond their control. Just look at the folks in North Korea or most parts of Africa.
Those of us who have "luxurious" jobs did have a choice, those other folks don't.
I'm saying that software developer lifestyles only look good because of the terribly poor conditions many other people work in, both in developed economies and in more obviously poverty-stricken places. We're lucky not to be those people, but to me "luxury" implies either greed or wastefulness - that as software developers we're getting some kind of unreasonably good deal from the world. I don't think we are. I think more people should get the kind of deal that software developers do.
Sure, in relative terms you can say that developers are lucky. But I'm not sure it makes much sense to say "you're lucky that you don't live in poverty", because we should consider modestly affluent lifestyles to be the norm and poverty to be the aberration that needs to be explained.
I don't agree with that definition of "luxury", and I think there are many others who also do not. Luxury is about comfort and choice, not greed and wastefulness.
the state of great comfort and extravagant living. "he lived a life of luxury" synonyms: opulence, luxuriousness, sumptuousness, grandeur, magnificence, splendor, lavishness, the lap of luxury, a bed of roses, (the land of) milk and honey
This says that luxury is about great comfort, something beyond the ordinary. The aristocrats of Downton Abbey live in luxury, the average software developer does not.
[1]: https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=cr&ei=rmQPU_OnKaW_ygOph4GAD...
No, that's the point of this article. The average developer does live in great comfort--beyond the ordinary--both in absolute terms worldwide (you have clean water and electricity), and relative terms within developed nations (you posess a well-paid skill that is in high demand and affords a flexible career).
Maybe this is just a cultural difference thing here. When I hear "luxury" I hear something like "extravagance" or "indulgence". Luxury is something you don't need and shouldn't feel entitled to. I think most people do need good jobs, respectful working conditions, good housing and time with their friends and family. I don't consider those to be luxuries, and I don't think that there's anything extravagant about those things. To me, this just highlights how truly awful it is that most people do not have these things.
I do disagree with your characterizing "luxury" solely in terms of consumption. To me, somebody who lives an ascetic lifestyle while saving the wages of their good job still has "luxuries" that others lack: economic security, having the freedom to quit their job if they want, etc.
I would not read the same thing into that word, which may be a regional thing? To me luxury and comfort are not the same as excess.
It's context dependant too. My 2003 Accord is a luxury, despite being far less nice and older than what I could afford, because I really have no need for it. Everything I need is within easy walking or transit distance, so even that car is a luxury for me.
That is a very interesting statement. I wish I could agree with you, but neither history nor the current state of the world support the idea that affluence is "normal."