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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class#The_prof...
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.
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.
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.
Looking at the from the outside it seems like a career with a lot more power there really is.
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.
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".)
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.