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I hope the parallel of SWEs working for Mega-Billionaires is not lost on the HN crowd.
by adamsmith143 5y ago
I hope the parallel of SWEs working for Mega-Billionaires is not lost on the HN crowd.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- me_me_mu_mu 5y agoBuild software to ~harass~ track warehouse workers. "Anyone can learn to code bruh" 170k base + 300k RSU "man I can't afford anything in [high COL area]" "Therapy is really useful y'all" - average SWE
- salmonfamine 5y agoSo what's the alternative? Move to a LCOL area, get a worse job, and watch as inflation turns it into a HCOL area?
- rpmisms 5y agoWork remote, move to middle of nowhere, raise livestock, and actually enjoy life.
- amanj41 5y agoDon't really think SWEs are being taken advantage of the same way other employees at successful tech companies are. (Coming from the perspective of an SWE)
- adamsmith143 5y agoDidn't mean that in general but there is a strong undercurrent of bootlicking and overworking oneself for little or no reward on HN.
- amanj41 5y agofair enough
- FredPret 5y agoWouldn’t call the typical SW career “little or no reward”
- adamsmith143 5y agoSure 300K TC seems impressive relative to the Barista you buy your Latte from but it pales in comparison to the amount that people like Zuckerburg, Musk, Bezos, etc have increased their wealth in the past 2 years for example, which is on the order of 10s of Billions. You are far closer to the homeless you guy step over on the way to Twitter HQ than to Jack Dorsey and sure if you deliver a great result this quarter maybe you'll make 400k next year but it's all relative.
- Shugarl 5y agoAre you actually comparing regular SW engineers to the wealthiest people on the planet ?
- FredPret 5y agoIt’s not relative. 300k buys you a fantastic life. You’ll never be in the 0.1% with a job vs owning assets, but these jobs are amazing by any measure, and a world away from being poor. The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply. You may say it buys them outsized influence, but media companies will always have owners, whether they be hectomillionaires or billionaires or whatever.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agospeaking from experience 300K buys you a fantastic life most of the time, but there can be problems that would be solved with more money but are unsolvable at the 300K level.
- adamsmith143 5y ago>The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply. I think this almost completely false. Elon Musk just bought Twitter and could drastically change a major point of interaction for hundreds of millions of people. The Koch Brothers spend billions to influence, to great effect, the laws that are passed in the US. These examples are not rare. The economy is almost zero sum, certainly since the 70s the top percentiles have been taking a larger portion of the pie even considering the growth of the pie. But anyway I think the general point is that is that even by working yourself to death you only increase your income or net worth by small numbers while someone like Elon Musk can 10x it over the same time period.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoMy vote for most taken advantage of is the on-call Ops people. Salaries sometimes half that of the SWEs, expected to be woken up at 3am, interrupted all day by "urgent" requests ("I can't connect to the server I need access now" -> "whoops it was my SSH key"), responsible for the product running 24/7, respond immediately to security incidents ("patch this asap"), stay up overnight for maintenance or deploys to legacy systems, act as de-facto architects, expected to be experts on virtually all technology. Wouldn't be surprised if one dude in Texas working 60+hrs/week is singly responsible for every Tesla in the country continuing to get remote updates.
- omnicognate 5y ago"Billionaire" doesn't need a prefix yet and it'll certainly be a while before we get any megabillionaires, aka quadrillionaires. Probably not long before we start having megamillionaires, aka kilobillionaires, aka trillionaires though. Elon Musk's around a quarter of the way there.
- adamsmith143 5y agoNot that there's a definite standard but someone worth over $100B feels Mega to me.
- omnicognate 5y agoI was joking about mega conventionally meaning a million of something [1]. I agree it's certainly "mega" in the informal/Aussie sense. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
- OJFord 5y agoNobody (in English at least) uses SI prefixes for currency though? £1M (happens to have the same shorthand, but) is never called 'a megapound'.
- genewitch 5y agoI sometimes say gigadollars (or gigabucks) when i want my [captive] audience to understand i am talking about an unfathomably large amount of money. I use SI prefixes a lot because i grew up with both computers and simple circuit-building, and still use computers and now radio. I also prefer to see $1mm to $1M, and i'm not even French!
- cardiffspaceman 5y agoMegapound sounds like something one of Eric Idle's Monty Python characters would have said. But back then it would have only been possessed by the guy who paid Lennon and McCartney.
- jrockway 5y agoI'm sitting on a comfy chair in a climate controlled apartment eating a cheeseburger that someone else made for me and brought to my house, while a machine washes my clothes and I read some discussion on the Internet during a paid lunch break. I'll take this over manual labor any day, even if someone else is getting richer than me.
- screenbreakout 5y agoI worked for a week manually preparing a lawn for my mum , was dead tired but my mind rehashed the book I was reading, among other things....most of the time though I don't work at all and take a minimal sum of money to live in a cheap country while looking after my kids and occasionally tending a huge garden and watching wondering about the world working itself to death for something they can continuously print more of... at least I contribute minimaly to the problem, I love non forced manual labor it's very Zen , you should try it someday, like making your own vegetarian cheesburgers I'm sure it'll seem all the tastier for not having used some underpaid soul to perpetuate the destructive fast food industry....