6 ms·

that's so relative. It is sooooo much more expensive to live up in New York with the cost of living higher than most states and all the taxes you have to pay...

that's so relative. It is sooooo much more expensive to live up in New York with the cost of living higher than most states and all the taxes you have to pay... Remember that you have fed and state... also if you work in NYC you have to pay a special tax. Top that off if you live in NJ and work in NYC, you're really paying alot in taxes. So your 150K might be down to 80K after all the taxes and commuter fees (like tolls) you have to pay.

zjaffee 8y ago
Except civic workers should be making middle class wages, especially ones that don't require extensive education. Why should a gilded class of unionized workers get these huge individual wages when the median family income there is still hovering around 55k.
- hondo77 8y ago
  Why shouldn't they?
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Why should a gilded class of web developers doing jobs that don't require extensive education get these huge individual wages when the median family income there is still hovering around 55k?
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    Because there's demand for developers that supply cannot meet, the demand to take on a civic job in NYC is tremendous, yet we constrain supply of these workers by paying very high wages. These organizations are crippling the cities ability to deliver services, if wages were 2/3s of what they were now, they could hire far more employees and potentially provide better services all around. Additionally, public sector unions are completely different than private sector ones. Concessions should be made to workers at the expense of capital not workers who make less than them.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      You just answered your own question about why cops and firefighters in NYC get paid so well: there's tremendous demand for their services. And the average cop almost certainly provides more value to society than the average programmer working on yet-another-CRUD-app. If wages were 2/3 of what they were now, even more companies could afford to higher programmers to build them custom CRUD applications to make their basic business processes more efficient and provide better services all around.
      - zjaffee 8y ago
        No there is tremendous demand to work in those fields, a demand that is not being met because of price fixing. They could lower their wages and hire far more people to provide better services. There is no wage fixing in the tech industry in a way that results in people getting paid more.
        Retric 8y ago
        The preference at companies like google for hiring from a small list of schools is self perpetuating and drives up wages. Worse, as with every other artificial limitation on hiring it actually lowers the quality of their employees.
        zjaffee 8y ago
        Google and other top companies don't just hire engineers from a small list of schools though, additionally, they hire tons of people from industry. The majority of hires at FANGs went to state schools with huge student bodies and reasonable acceptance rates.
        Retric 8y ago
        preference != requirement. Some companies prefer to higher from a specific state school, that again causes them to pay more for less talented applicants. Suppose you have two applications one with your hidden preference and one without. If your preference has say slightly less experience or requires slightly more pay, well they are a slightly better applicant in your mind so that’s ok.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  middle class != median income
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    Yes it is, the entire definition of middle class is median income. Just because the quality of life for the people within this income range has gone down does not make them any less middle class than they were before.
    - omegaworks 8y ago
      >the entire definition of middle class is median income Nope. Middle class is a class of people, not an income range. They are typically described as people that work in stable salaried employment, with a pension or retirement plan, with the ability to afford a house with their spouse and education for their kids.
      - zjaffee 8y ago
        Either way, a single person making 60k would put them in the middle class should they have a spouse making the same amount. The real median wage is a little more than half of that.
        omegaworks 8y ago
        Not at all. Let's run the numbers. The average cost of a 1 bedroom[1] apartment in the city nets out at $43k for the year, that's an entire spouse's net salary [2]. Average cost of childcare is anywhere from $15k-30k annually[3]. This is just baseline needs for two working parents. 1. https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-tre... 2. https://neuvoo.com/tax-calculator/?iam=&salary=60000&from=year&region=New+York https://neuvoo.com/tax-calculator/?iam=&salary=60000&from=ye... 3. https://www.nyu.edu/employees/life-wellness/family-care/child-care/young-children/child-care-centers.html https://www.nyu.edu/employees/life-wellness/family-care/chil...
- ramphastidae 8y ago
  This is a feature, not a bug. Just because wages haven't increased since the 90s and the middle class has collapsed in the US doesn’t mean the hard-won protections of unions should be slashed to match.
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    Unions in the private sector provide workers protections from exploitative capitalists who exist for the sake of profit and profit alone. Public agencies exist to better society, if we paid these workers less, than we could hire more, and these sorts of jobs would be available to more people where services could potentially improve.
  - chrisdhoover 8y ago
    Its a fucked up situation. It is not equitable at all. For some reason the ever increasing government functionary class gets more and more of their fellow citizens hard earned wages.
tooltalk 8y ago
No, wrong. It's not sooooo much expensive to live in NY unless you live in Manhattan along with bankers and media tycoons. In fact, most folks who work in Manhattan still come from outer boroughs and suburbs like LI, Queens and Brooklyn where the cost of living, especially rent, is nowhere as crazy. In fact, until a decade ago, Manhattan wasn't seen as an ideal place to raise families and most middle-class folks lived outside the city.
- thrownaway954 8y ago
  And you know this cause you have family and friends that live in LI and commute to NYC for work everyday like I do? And just to prove you don't know what you are talking about, below are links to a cost of living calculator West Palm Beach Florida - 85K https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ Queens New York - 130K https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/
  - tooltalk 8y ago
    I know so b/c I grew up and lived in NYC since 1990. It's somewhat laughable to hear someone who claims to know so much about the city where the median median income is only $55k making such absurd claims to justify NYPD cops' $150K salary. I personally don't have any problem with cops making that much money as long as the city is safe and they are not cheating the system. Having worked as a public servant at a less-offending NYC agency, however, the problem I see is that everyone is out to milk the system as much as possible and there seems to be almost little or no control over this (ie, wage inflation among "certain" class of public servants or opportunists).
    - zjaffee 8y ago
      Thank you, racist cops in NYC along side corrupt subway officials get to make competitive upper middle class wages, while public defenders and social workers get their budgets cut.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago

zjaffee 8y ago

Except civic workers should be making middle class wages, especially ones that don't require extensive education. Why should a gilded class of unionized workers get these huge individual wages when the median family income there is still hovering around 55k.

hondo77 8y ago
Why shouldn't they?
ForHackernews 8y ago
Why should a gilded class of web developers doing jobs that don't require extensive education get these huge individual wages when the median family income there is still hovering around 55k?
- zjaffee 8y ago
  Because there's demand for developers that supply cannot meet, the demand to take on a civic job in NYC is tremendous, yet we constrain supply of these workers by paying very high wages. These organizations are crippling the cities ability to deliver services, if wages were 2/3s of what they were now, they could hire far more employees and potentially provide better services all around. Additionally, public sector unions are completely different than private sector ones. Concessions should be made to workers at the expense of capital not workers who make less than them.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    You just answered your own question about why cops and firefighters in NYC get paid so well: there's tremendous demand for their services. And the average cop almost certainly provides more value to society than the average programmer working on yet-another-CRUD-app. If wages were 2/3 of what they were now, even more companies could afford to higher programmers to build them custom CRUD applications to make their basic business processes more efficient and provide better services all around.
    - zjaffee 8y ago
      No there is tremendous demand to work in those fields, a demand that is not being met because of price fixing. They could lower their wages and hire far more people to provide better services. There is no wage fixing in the tech industry in a way that results in people getting paid more.
      - Retric 8y ago
        The preference at companies like google for hiring from a small list of schools is self perpetuating and drives up wages. Worse, as with every other artificial limitation on hiring it actually lowers the quality of their employees.
        zjaffee 8y ago
        Google and other top companies don't just hire engineers from a small list of schools though, additionally, they hire tons of people from industry. The majority of hires at FANGs went to state schools with huge student bodies and reasonable acceptance rates.
        Retric 8y ago
        preference != requirement. Some companies prefer to higher from a specific state school, that again causes them to pay more for less talented applicants. Suppose you have two applications one with your hidden preference and one without. If your preference has say slightly less experience or requires slightly more pay, well they are a slightly better applicant in your mind so that’s ok.
omegaworks 8y ago
middle class != median income
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zjaffee 8y ago
  Yes it is, the entire definition of middle class is median income. Just because the quality of life for the people within this income range has gone down does not make them any less middle class than they were before.
  - omegaworks 8y ago
    >the entire definition of middle class is median income Nope. Middle class is a class of people, not an income range. They are typically described as people that work in stable salaried employment, with a pension or retirement plan, with the ability to afford a house with their spouse and education for their kids.
    - zjaffee 8y ago
      Either way, a single person making 60k would put them in the middle class should they have a spouse making the same amount. The real median wage is a little more than half of that.
      - omegaworks 8y ago
        Not at all. Let's run the numbers. The average cost of a 1 bedroom[1] apartment in the city nets out at $43k for the year, that's an entire spouse's net salary [2]. Average cost of childcare is anywhere from $15k-30k annually[3]. This is just baseline needs for two working parents. 1. https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-tre... 2. https://neuvoo.com/tax-calculator/?iam=&salary=60000&from=year&region=New+York https://neuvoo.com/tax-calculator/?iam=&salary=60000&from=ye... 3. https://www.nyu.edu/employees/life-wellness/family-care/child-care/young-children/child-care-centers.html https://www.nyu.edu/employees/life-wellness/family-care/chil...
ramphastidae 8y ago
This is a feature, not a bug. Just because wages haven't increased since the 90s and the middle class has collapsed in the US doesn’t mean the hard-won protections of unions should be slashed to match.
- zjaffee 8y ago
  Unions in the private sector provide workers protections from exploitative capitalists who exist for the sake of profit and profit alone. Public agencies exist to better society, if we paid these workers less, than we could hire more, and these sorts of jobs would be available to more people where services could potentially improve.
- chrisdhoover 8y ago
  Its a fucked up situation. It is not equitable at all. For some reason the ever increasing government functionary class gets more and more of their fellow citizens hard earned wages.

tooltalk 8y ago

No, wrong. It's not sooooo much expensive to live in NY unless you live in Manhattan along with bankers and media tycoons. In fact, most folks who work in Manhattan still come from outer boroughs and suburbs like LI, Queens and Brooklyn where the cost of living, especially rent, is nowhere as crazy. In fact, until a decade ago, Manhattan wasn't seen as an ideal place to raise families and most middle-class folks lived outside the city.

thrownaway954 8y ago
And you know this cause you have family and friends that live in LI and commute to NYC for work everyday like I do? And just to prove you don't know what you are talking about, below are links to a cost of living calculator West Palm Beach Florida - 85K https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ Queens New York - 130K https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/
- tooltalk 8y ago
  I know so b/c I grew up and lived in NYC since 1990. It's somewhat laughable to hear someone who claims to know so much about the city where the median median income is only $55k making such absurd claims to justify NYPD cops' $150K salary. I personally don't have any problem with cops making that much money as long as the city is safe and they are not cheating the system. Having worked as a public servant at a less-offending NYC agency, however, the problem I see is that everyone is out to milk the system as much as possible and there seems to be almost little or no control over this (ie, wage inflation among "certain" class of public servants or opportunists).
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    Thank you, racist cops in NYC along side corrupt subway officials get to make competitive upper middle class wages, while public defenders and social workers get their budgets cut.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago