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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, there's sort of a weird meme among (for lack of a better word) creative class types that anyone who doesn't use a Macbook for work is literally working 120 hrs in a salt mine to support 8 children as a single parent. It's sort of a noble savage stereotype, but in reality "working class" (even just that name is indicative of this idea) people are still people too -- they do things on their time off, some of them are hard-working, some of them are lazy, some of them do a good job at work, some of them suck, some of them are good parents, some of them aren't.

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Btw we are working class too, even with those fancy 6 figure salaries...

At least I'm not living of off strutting around in my park telling my gardener what to do while stroking a white cat. I don't have employees in my factory solely working for me generating my income while I twiddle my thumbs. I'm actually sitting on a computer working for money every day, so: working class.

In the US, we distinguish between the "working class" and the "professional class", with programmers falling into the latter group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class#The_prof...

In the UK it's basically if you work for wages and/or in low skilled or manual labour.

Working for wages is not enough to qualify: doctor, university professor, airline pilot, solicitor... All traditionally firmly middle class professions despite working for a living.

Wages vs salary

Huh?

I have worked in a vast multitude of jobs, some manual, some temp office, some salaried, some self-employed, some company director.

Never in the UK have I ever heard of people making a distinction between a Wage and a Salary. They're the same thing.

Middle class means something completely different than the definition you're defending. Skilled office workers are firmly in the UK middle class (despite my Thatcher hating friend's assertion that he's not). It might be argued that unskilled office workers, like call centres, are now working class jobs.

the distinction, in american english, is that a wage is a per-hour thing, whereas a salary is paid for a period of employment (usually a fortnight or a month), independent of the time you actually spent working within that period.

But we weren't talking about America, we were talking about the UK.

Traditionally, middle class has always meant that you own your own business.

A hot dog vendor who owns their own cart is middle class. A doctor who works for a hospital is not. It has nothing to do with income or prestige.

We're talking about the UK here, I've never heard that definition in the UK and any definition of middle class that excludes doctors in the UK seems way out of line with how the term is generally used in my experience.

@mattnewport

Wages vs. salaried worker i.e. being paid weekly, possibly cash in hand for hours worked vs. a regular fixed monthly bank payment based on an annual salary.

That's not what working class means, though.

In the dichotomy between workers and capitalists it does. Though I doubt that's what was meant.

Marxist.org has this definition (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/e.htm):

Petty-bourgeois

...

2) Also refers to the growing group of workers whose function is management of the bourgeois apparatus. These workers do not produce commodities, but instead manage the production, distribution, and/or exchange of commodities and/or services owned by their bourgeois employers.

While these workers are a part of the working class because they receive a wage and their livelihood is dependent on that wage, they are separated from working class consciousness because they have day-to-day control, but not ownership, over the means of production, distribution, and exchange.

That describes managers, maybe programmers writing internal software if you're really stretching it. Thanks for the definition though.

> even with those fancy 6 figure salaries...

And I hate to break to it you Google and Facebook employees, but your salary ain't that great when you factor in cost-of-living. There are many, many thousands of devs across America making much more than you once you account for cost-of-living (and you should).

But between the proven wage suppression, ageism, and now this passing meme that somehow making $100,000 in the most expensive place to live in the U.S. makes you part of the global elite, I have little hope that you all will wake up and demand fair compensation.

This really depends on where you are in life. Cost of living calculations tend to not work well with individual preferences and situations. In this case, it depends on how much living space desired.

Generally speaking, the premium a single programmer makes for living in the Silicon Valley makes it worth being there. If said programmer is happy living with roommates, all the more so.

However, the premium must be higher for someone with dependents due to the desire to have more living space.

> However, the premium must be higher for someone with dependents due to the desire to have more living space

It has virtually nothing to do living space and everything to do with schools. To live in an area with decent schools, you pay a huge rent for even small homes or apartments.

But I give you credit, you're the only one who responded who even considered the cost of dependents, which makes a massive difference.

A few things you're missing: The perks. If my company feeds me and provides transportation stipend my only bills are rent, utils, and fun. Utils are the same as just about anywhere else in my experience. The rent is the only killer.

You're also looking at it the wrong way. Many of us don't plan on staying here. Yes our savings are very small in comparison to cost of living while we're here. It's when we leave that our money becomes very valuable. Knowing the ratio of your savings per month(in the bay area) vs cost of living where you want to be (somewhere cheap) can be very motivating to keep you here (my ratio is 4:1 , so every month I'm here I save enough money to live 4 months at the place I plan to live). It's sacrificing a few years of insane living cost to have a cushion that allows you a comfortable life after the craziness as well as a resume that looks outstanding. There's also the possibility your startup sells, but I can't claim that as a valley only perk because that can obviously happen anywhere, but I think you're a bit more likely to have it happen in the bay area.

You also meet a great deal of people and make a great deal of friends that love the same things you love all the way down to a specific framework (there are no Flask meetups in milwaukee). You also meet lots of people who introduce you to things you never knew you would love, which is often MORE fun.

All that being said, I agree that there are more efficient places to live where you could save more, and there are companies outside of the bay area doing all of the above things, but the luck factor there grows as you get away from the valley because there are fewer positions.

> A few things you're missing: The perks. If my company feeds me and provides transportation stipend my only bills are rent, utils, and fun.

It's not a perk if the ultimate effect, if not the intended effect, is that it keeps you at work 60 hours a week. There's something deeply insidious about plying your employees with free food and services and encouraging them to build their social circles entirely out of their co-workers. Who needs work-life balance if work is your life?

I will agree with that in certain cases such as Apple or Google, but the startup world isn't really that way.

If you're working for a startup and just think of yourself as an employee you're doing it wrong. You should think of yourself as an investor, not an employee, because you very likely are in every sense of the word.

This is where the friend thing comes in. You're not building friends at company X, you're meeting other people who happen to be investing in the same thing you do. I've kept great friends from previous companies I've worked at who understand that you're an investor and you must look at the company as an investment and be able to walk away if you don't like where it's going.

It does keep you working 60 hours a week, sure, but that's your investment for the shares your received in your offer letter. You stand to make a large amount of money without any capital put in. Regular 40 hour a week employees never get those shares, so obviously they shouldn't put in 60 hours a week to make the CEO a few extra bucks (however there's a caveat here when it comes to bonuses, and i'd argue THATs the return on investment for google employees).

A clearer example of a difference here is that I've seen developers walk away after 5 months at a job. In a regular employee universe that would be career suicide. Because this is the startup world, you only have to say "I didn't like the direction the company was going..." to other potential employers and so long as you're competent they totally get what you mean, because obviously many startups fail and if you see true disaster coming you would be crazy not to bail.

Often times it's actually these "employee" types that kill the startup. They just ride the funding into however many rounds they can until the ship crashes, then find a new place and continue the dragging.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I came here from a place where the "employee" mentality is king (40 years x 40 hours a week x 401k = retire), because it's the most common thing in America and it took me a very long time to get this (I'm an investor, not an employee). There's also the other factors like most people here REALLY enjoy their jobs and have been doing this on their own time for 60 hours a week already, so doing it for a paycheck is just a really cool side effect.

Well, it actually makes you part of the global elite, when you're well off in a country where being well off isn't just not starving:

"An American having the average income of the bottom U.S. decile is better-off than 2/3 of world population." (Milanovic 2002, p. 50)

"The top 10% of the U.S. population has an aggregate income equal to income of the poorest 43 percent of people in the world, or differently put, total income of the richest 25 million Americans is equal to total income of almost 2 billion people." (Milanovic 2002, p. 50)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_inequality

If you earn $100K and are single, you're in the 96th percentile. If you're married and only income, you're in the 67th. (http://www.whatsmypercent.com/)

Is it a huge salary? Sure it isn't. Having a bigger income and more savings is always welcome, but don't act like we're in the brink of starvation.

Take home money in our profession is still usually higher even when cost of living in the Bay Area is higher than in most places on Earth. You can eventually move away from the Bay Area with the savings you accumulated there. Of course, if the standard of living you expect is having a three bedroom house, it's going to be hard to attain, but looking at people in comparable urban areas (London, Paris, etc.) the expectation is that you'll live in a tiny apartment, just like in SF.

Its extremely easy to live in the Bay Area comfortably on a 6 figure salary-lots of working poor live here on far less. When engineers complain that their six figure salary isn't keeping up with the cost of living, what they really mean is that they can't afford a 4 bedroom house with a two car garage and lawn in a nice part of MV/PA or Sunnyvale, a new car, vacation and Burning Man every year, expensive hobbies, travel and tons of electronic gadgets. Not that they can't find a decent apartment to live in and are homeless in Sunnyvale.

This was not the point i was making.

Btw I hate to destroy your little made up world where all your stereotypes and what you think are a reality, but I don't live in the U.S., my company has under 10 employees and is self founded...

P.S.: Ofc there are a myriad of definitions of 'working class', but personally I believe 'middle class' is just an invention to make people who earn slightly more while being used for their surplus feel slightly better. And it's working pretty well.

>Btw we are working class too, even with those fancy 6 figure salaries...

No, we're not. We're the down trodden, continually squeezed middle or upper middle class depending on the cost of living where you are.

Depends on the individual and how they accrue their income. Someone with a six figure income, which includes investment income and income from selling their time, would fall under middle class but someone who makes that six figures from working alone would qualify as working class. It is not the amount that matters here, it is how that amount is generated.

You're working class if you are renting your labor out to a capital owner to produce your income.

You're middle class if you are applying your own labor to capital you own to produce your income.

You're capitalist class if you are renting other people's labor to apply to capital you own to produce your income.

(These aren't discrete categories; they might be better read with "if you are" replaced with "to the extent you are".)

By far the biggest thing that surprised me after entering into the CS field 3 years ago is that being a programming just like a white collar version of being an electrician or plummer.

Looking at the from the outside it seems like a career with a lot more power there really is.

"Just". What is "just" about being an electrician? Is it less than being a more conventional white collar worker, like some kind of administrator or manager?

I meant "just like," not "just" in the sense you mean.

I'll admit I jumped the gun on that one.

If your definition of working class is anyone who works for a living, then you are using a very unconventional definition. Using conventional definitions, the "middle class" consists entirely of people who work for a living. The factor distinguishing them from the working class being that they have significant disposable income.

The working poor holding down two jobs are definitely doing that.

Most blue-collar & white-collar middle class are working less than the average startup. Recall way way back before startups were what everyone and their brother wanted to do after graduating, the premise was 'if instead of holding this easy job, I worked my ass off to my full potential, I could cash out at 35 and retire'. Admitting that startups were a huge amount of work, but something you did for a few years only, was part of the narrative.

Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast. - Paul Graham

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

To make themselves feel better about working 120 hrs a week in front of a screen?

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