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> To be clear, I do quite a bit better than that... I'm not complaining. But using 120k as an example...a person went from making 4x the typical full time salar

> To be clear, I do quite a bit better than that... I'm not complaining. But using 120k as an example...a person went from making 4x the typical full time salary to 2x the typical full time salary in a very short period. This is what I will never understand about most established tech people, they see all the widespread misery and poverty in SV and they still have the capacity to feel sorry for themselves for not making X times more than 'that other guy.' It's always about what they don't have rather than see that they live in an insulated bubble existence that they could never really navigate if it weren't for that wealth disparity because they have such a narrow limited set of skills. aWant an experiment turn off the wifi, see how quickly these people lose their minds. I'm not mad at you for it, for all I know you are self-taught guy that beat out a bunch Stanford grads by grinding since HS and making it on your own, but it's this never-ending need to beat that guy. Its like that scene in American Psycho with those business cards, where for some odd reason people seem to have a need to over-embellish their existence's value with triviality that re-enforces the 'yeah, but I have more than that guy' narrative which is completely lost on me. I hate to tell you but you will never have more than a Bezos or a Musk, either. Not to mention the Nation-state level despots of the World who don't have their net-worth listed on the Forbes 500. Just enjoy what you have, while you have it, because I can assure those very same tech companies are pouring tons of money to render you obsolete as soon as possible.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
The cost of everything else raised as well, so wealthy tech workers also lost purchasing power (especially after the last stock crash).
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > I don't understand this opinion. Ok, let me spell it out: you're not special. Nothing about your profession makes you special, you are not somehow better than anyone because you can sit at a computer and write code. It's a skill, a very highly compensated one for now but an incredibly narrow one that happens to be useful a select few corps, sure, but so was were many other things. And if one thing that COVID has taught us is how incredibly unnecessary you are to maintaining civilization--unless you are some supply chain developer in which case you were doomed either way. No one was calling for the return for programmers like they were for even barbers or cooks, in fact people lauded the fact that FB went down. In short, you like being told you're special, it makes you feel good. But you are not. Wide spread misery isn't about equality, I can assure this isn't what I'm advocating here, it's about a self-awareness issue.
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    > you are not somehow better than anyone because you can sit at a computer and write code. You're right, any human being with a pulse can produce effective software with no training or education or experience or effort whatsoever, and nobody's better at it than anybody else, unlike every other single human endeavor.
  - grog454 4y ago
    > And if one thing that COVID has taught us is how incredibly unnecessary you are to maintaining civilization--unless you are some supply chain developer Wait what? So you somehow realize that if you're a software engineer supporting some necessary field, you're necessary by extension, but apparently the only thing we needed during covid was a function supply chain. Impressive mental gymnastics. No one was calling for the "return" of programmers because (almost) no one interacts with them directly like they do their barber. Do you think their barbers decided during covid that they no longer needed to support credit card payments, an electronic scheduling system, etc?
  - emteycz 4y ago
    I assume this is a reply to my comment. What you're saying here is right, but I have no idea why you're saying it as I really don't care about being special, at all. Never crossed my mind until now, and nobody ever told me so (except for the other meaning of "special", and that has a lot of truth to it). And then, even if I thought I was special (I don't), I would still be fully capable of feeling concerned for other less fortunate people while feeling concerned about making less than X times the average. Anyways, the demand for software engineers increased extremely significantly (multiples of open positions, rates doubled) when Covid started and all remaining companies hopped on the digital transformation trend; and that continues to today. Every contract I interviewed for since it began, they literally begged me to work for them (previously it felt like we're equals, they were able to say no without fear of not finding anyone else). They don't even ask programming questions anymore, they just try to make their company look like the best place while apologizing profusely for their limited budget. Your characterization of the programmers market seems totally out of loop.
    - 4y ago
TimPC 4y ago
People have expectations set by parents and society. Things like owning a house are socially expected and difficult in SV. It’s fairly natural to feel “sorry for yourself” when making good money if that good money either isn’t leading to a mortgage and a home or if that good money results in substantial challenges with said home and said mortgage. Just because someone is more well off doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. It’s not enough to fix affordable housing and say job done if the housing market is completely broken solving the problem requires fixing housing for everyone including the well off.
- dekhn 4y ago
  The house trance in SV is very disturbing to me. I saw a lot- and I mean a lot of people move in with their families from the midwest to work at FAAMG, and then bought a house in sunnyvale which they absolutely HATE. From the high prices to the schools filled with grinds, they just want to move back to the midwest and live near the rest of their families in a place where land is cheap and people don't try to compete so hard in high school. Perpetual misery.
  - danans 4y ago
    > From the high prices to the schools filled with grinds Interesting to see the word "grind" word making a comeback. It's first manifestation was "greasy grind", used as a pejorative for academically hard working immigrant kids - usually Jewish - before WW2. Before we start applying labels like that to people again, perhaps it would be better to look at the incentive structures that cause people to be so driven academically, even if to a fault. For example, many of those people might not have a place like the Midwest to move back to, or even if they did, it would be even more hyper competitive (like much of Asia). > they just want to move back to the midwest and live near the rest of their families in a place where land is cheap and people don't try to compete so hard in high school. I sympathize with this as I think the SV style academic rat race damages kids' curiosity in the name of status, but the Midwest didn't sit still this whole time. You will find such hyper competitive academic systems these days in many parts of the Midwest too, especially in the "nice" suburbs that people want to move to with cheaper land, big houses, "good" schools, and probably a short driving distance from a Whole Foods (or similarly posh supermarket).
quickthrower2 4y ago
Your argument I visualize as the floor falling from the room, the lowest paid have fallen, tech workers are “safe for now” but they are concerned and are trying to move to safer ground, and Bezos is in a spaceship above it all. People who think techies are well paid probably haven’t tried raising a family yet.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > People who think techies are well paid probably haven’t tried raising a family yet. I started my own fintech startup by bootstrapping and working 90+ hours a week and I managed to survive in Boulder where/when the average house price was over 1 million USD, you will get no sympathy from me. My investments are the only thing that saved me, and I didn't have health benefits that entire time. I treaded water and almost drowned many times most of it's existence while disrupting an entire Industry in the process and eventually got head hunted by a mega corp. When will you realize that are not one of the tech oligarchs? What part of that don't you get yet? You're an expendable part of the equation. You guys have been coddled so much by these corps that insulate you from reality I almost wonder if you can see the trees from the forest and what your role is in all of this?
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    We are making the same point. I think few people are under any illusions, the “comparing total compensation” movement probably came out of people wanting to get a bit more out of the ogilarchs for that comfortable retirement but not thinking they are one themselves (numerically there can only be so many)
silisili 4y ago
I get that and appreciate you calling it out, I'm not blind to how whiny it sounds. FWIW, I don't live in SV or make an SV salary. I've always tried to stay at 2x the prevailing local wage, so that my wife can stay home and take care of the house and kid with no worry. That's really my only motivation. When you're doing more than 2x, you feel ahead of the curve. When 2x comes at you fast, you start to sweat a little. But it's not lost on me that I'm lucky to be able to have such an existence.
eru 4y ago
> This is what I will never understand about most established tech people, they see all the widespread misery and poverty in SV and they still have the capacity to feel sorry for themselves for not making X times more than 'that other guy.' Out of sight, out of mind? What does it matter whether the misery and poverty is in your neighbourhood, or in the third world?
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > Out of sight, out of mind? What does it matter whether the misery and poverty is in your neighbourhood, or in the third world? Or a level self-abosrbedness that can only be defined as peak narcissism, really. I get wanting to be paid what you're worth, but when it comes to pretending you're some how any better than any other wage-slave is where I have trouble crossing over that level of hubris.
emteycz 4y ago
> This is what I will never understand about most established tech people, they see all the widespread misery and poverty in SV and they still have the capacity to feel sorry for themselves for not making X times more than 'that other guy. I don't understand this opinion. Why are the two feelings in conflict? I can be concerned for the people around me AND be concerned that I'm making less than X times more than the average. I really don't think there's anything good about equality if it means a programmer is making the same as the unqualified people - to me that signals a completely broken world that can't function. This kind of equality has been tried and failed spectacularly, and I live in a place that still feels the catastrophe today, 30 years post-facto, and it will be felt for the next 30 years at least, too. Overall, equality seems to me to be a misguided goal. We want people to have comfortable, healthy lives - I don't see how that relates to financial equality at all. Life needs to get cheaper so even the poor people can afford it - making everyone an equal millionaire will never work, that would just cause the prices to rise so much nobody could afford it and the meme of "equal misery" would become a reality once again. Let's talk about financial equality again once machines can do all the work.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > Why are the two feelings in conflict? I can be concerned for the people around me AND be concerned that I'm making less than X times more than the average. Because as a tech worker your salary is likely already well above the level that it would need to fall in order for us to achieve meaningful level of wealth equality (not complete equality, but equal-ish) > making everyone an equal millionaire will never work Yes, exactly. But could work is having a scale of something like lower middle class to upper middle class incomes and getting rid of millionaires entirely (or making them as rare as billionaires are today). If we want to bring people out of poverty that money has to come from somewhere, and if you're making 6 figures some of it probably needs to come from you.
  - emteycz 4y ago
    > Because as a tech worker your salary is likely already well above the level that it would need to fall in order for us to achieve meaningful level of wealth equality (not complete equality, but equal-ish) Why would you want that??? I think it's awesome the common Joe can learn programming on the internet and earn huge bucks. Why cancel that of all things? And then, I don't think your suggestion for equality would work. If my work was significantly taxed above $100K, I'd stop earning more at that point because work is very stressful to me and I'm not going to do it if I don't get the benefit of it; and I'd most definitely not go into any sort of risk (like starting a startup) in that world. If I can't even bang on a keyboard without someone feeling entitled to get the majority of my product, well then I'm not doing it, sorry. Everybody would lose - I'd pay much less taxes overall, and innovation from my side would grind to halt. (now I earn slightly less than $100k, but also live and work in Europe).
zivkovicp 4y ago
> because they have such a narrow limited set of skills If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  Narrow =/= Easy The fact that you cannot see that is what I mean, you take what I said as a personal insult while simultaneously having the collective view that if 'poor people want to stop being poor they should learn to code like me' around here. It's cognitive dissonance and the part that I don't get is how you think people with other skills would want to do this even if given the choice were it not for the money. I'm a self-taught coder and don't regard myself highly. I will be honest, I never thought it was easy but it's also not difficult in the same way that biochemistry, nuclear chemistry or organic chemistry is difficult either: it's more tedious than it is anything else. It's all relative to what you've done before, I suppose. It's a lot of grinding, searching and revising and a war of attrition. All while putting up with people who quite frankly have the social skills of a lamppost and not giving into the urge of wanting to just quit and leave it all behind and start a hobby farm--as is so common in the tech circles towards the end.
  - zivkovicp 4y ago
    I can see what you mean, I just don't agree about the skills. I agree to a large extent about the social skills, and even the hobby farm seeing as I've considered it more than once... but being good in IT requires a wide range of skills. It feels like most people that enter the field now are here because of the money, which is OK, but that doesn't mean they are any good, many are not, they are just taking advantage of a good opportunity. Again, that is OK. This is a gig that won't last forever, like having a popular YouTube channel, so there is no reason to read into it any more than "people are jumping on the bandwagon during a gold-rush", and no reason to get so upset about it. There is no more or less social inequality because of IT workers than there was during the "house flipping" trend from a few years back, Crypto, social media influencer channels, etc. There are a lot of good paying jobs, and no job will ever make you wealthy or powerful, so no reason to get worked up over ordinary working-class people (even if they make 6 figures, it's the 8+ figures that oppress). edit: spelling
weatherlite 4y ago
> This is what I will never understand about most established tech people, they see all the widespread misery and poverty in SV and they still have the capacity to feel sorry for themselves for not making X times more than 'that other guy.' As opposed to who exactly? The system is based on greed and maximizing profits/salaries/status/whatever. Are doctors/lawyers/financial people not behaving this way? Some doctors earn around one million USD a year in the U.S, that's money that makes insurance more expensive and unaffordable for everyone.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > Some doctors earn around one million USD a year in the U.S, that's money that makes insurance more expensive and unaffordable for everyone. You're seriously not comparing yourself to physicians in level of importance in Society, are you?! As I said, after COVID we got a real wake up call of who mattered, and Nurses and Physicians deserve every penny that they get, its the system that is broken: see Stanford nurse strike. Moreover, it's actually not the physician salaries that keep things unaffordable, but the over-pricing of every bloated expense, procedure, medication, drug etc... that keeps it at those levels and simply because they can. Believe me, I just did 2 MRIs that I put off for several years because of COVID, physicians who I met before COVID who were doing well, and are probably better of financially now then before have been run-down significantly and they all had the same tells of using amphetamines/cocaine that I saw in my undergrad as pre-med students and bio students did the same courses. The real blame is at the administrative level, and accounting not the physician or nurse level. My MRI required that 2 specialists sign off on it before the Insurance approved it and everyone took a cut, such that by the time I got my MRI it was actually less (in the 1000s) than the 2 specialist visits to get that one MRI. I did this once again for my 2nd one and the same thing. I also got an EMG in 2019 and had to go for another one, it didn't matter that I had significant atrophy and weakness, not that I was approved for one before when it wasn't as bad as it is now. I had to go through the same process and everyone got their cut. So, again... no you're embellishing YOUR value if you think you are comparing apples to apples, its simply not the same thing at all. And none of you were working double shifts in an ER or Urgent care when COVID was at it's peak, or the large amount of attempted or successful suicides as lockdown, so really, get some perspective. You work on computeres, and many of you boast about really only doing 4 hours of work a day, the fact that you're posts counts are as high and still complaining about salary is testament of this very facade. And no, I don't agree, the 'system' was not based on greed, you chose to make it about greed because so many other have as well and is another matter entirely, because most physicians and some nurses are drowning in debt by the time they get to earning a decent salary. I agree they should optimize for that given those circumstances and many have after COVID and those who haven't are jumping ship or leaving the Industry all together, which is why we should pay them whatever they deserve/ask for (within reason, of course) to retain them. People aren't even aware of how many nurses are simply over the job entirely and will be quitting in masse.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

The cost of everything else raised as well, so wealthy tech workers also lost purchasing power (especially after the last stock crash).

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> I don't understand this opinion. Ok, let me spell it out: you're not special. Nothing about your profession makes you special, you are not somehow better than anyone because you can sit at a computer and write code. It's a skill, a very highly compensated one for now but an incredibly narrow one that happens to be useful a select few corps, sure, but so was were many other things. And if one thing that COVID has taught us is how incredibly unnecessary you are to maintaining civilization--unless you are some supply chain developer in which case you were doomed either way. No one was calling for the return for programmers like they were for even barbers or cooks, in fact people lauded the fact that FB went down. In short, you like being told you're special, it makes you feel good. But you are not. Wide spread misery isn't about equality, I can assure this isn't what I'm advocating here, it's about a self-awareness issue.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > you are not somehow better than anyone because you can sit at a computer and write code. You're right, any human being with a pulse can produce effective software with no training or education or experience or effort whatsoever, and nobody's better at it than anybody else, unlike every other single human endeavor.
- grog454 4y ago
  > And if one thing that COVID has taught us is how incredibly unnecessary you are to maintaining civilization--unless you are some supply chain developer Wait what? So you somehow realize that if you're a software engineer supporting some necessary field, you're necessary by extension, but apparently the only thing we needed during covid was a function supply chain. Impressive mental gymnastics. No one was calling for the "return" of programmers because (almost) no one interacts with them directly like they do their barber. Do you think their barbers decided during covid that they no longer needed to support credit card payments, an electronic scheduling system, etc?
- emteycz 4y ago
  I assume this is a reply to my comment. What you're saying here is right, but I have no idea why you're saying it as I really don't care about being special, at all. Never crossed my mind until now, and nobody ever told me so (except for the other meaning of "special", and that has a lot of truth to it). And then, even if I thought I was special (I don't), I would still be fully capable of feeling concerned for other less fortunate people while feeling concerned about making less than X times the average. Anyways, the demand for software engineers increased extremely significantly (multiples of open positions, rates doubled) when Covid started and all remaining companies hopped on the digital transformation trend; and that continues to today. Every contract I interviewed for since it began, they literally begged me to work for them (previously it felt like we're equals, they were able to say no without fear of not finding anyone else). They don't even ask programming questions anymore, they just try to make their company look like the best place while apologizing profusely for their limited budget. Your characterization of the programmers market seems totally out of loop.
  - 4y ago

TimPC 4y ago

People have expectations set by parents and society. Things like owning a house are socially expected and difficult in SV. It’s fairly natural to feel “sorry for yourself” when making good money if that good money either isn’t leading to a mortgage and a home or if that good money results in substantial challenges with said home and said mortgage. Just because someone is more well off doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. It’s not enough to fix affordable housing and say job done if the housing market is completely broken solving the problem requires fixing housing for everyone including the well off.

dekhn 4y ago
The house trance in SV is very disturbing to me. I saw a lot- and I mean a lot of people move in with their families from the midwest to work at FAAMG, and then bought a house in sunnyvale which they absolutely HATE. From the high prices to the schools filled with grinds, they just want to move back to the midwest and live near the rest of their families in a place where land is cheap and people don't try to compete so hard in high school. Perpetual misery.
- danans 4y ago
  > From the high prices to the schools filled with grinds Interesting to see the word "grind" word making a comeback. It's first manifestation was "greasy grind", used as a pejorative for academically hard working immigrant kids - usually Jewish - before WW2. Before we start applying labels like that to people again, perhaps it would be better to look at the incentive structures that cause people to be so driven academically, even if to a fault. For example, many of those people might not have a place like the Midwest to move back to, or even if they did, it would be even more hyper competitive (like much of Asia). > they just want to move back to the midwest and live near the rest of their families in a place where land is cheap and people don't try to compete so hard in high school. I sympathize with this as I think the SV style academic rat race damages kids' curiosity in the name of status, but the Midwest didn't sit still this whole time. You will find such hyper competitive academic systems these days in many parts of the Midwest too, especially in the "nice" suburbs that people want to move to with cheaper land, big houses, "good" schools, and probably a short driving distance from a Whole Foods (or similarly posh supermarket).

quickthrower2 4y ago

Your argument I visualize as the floor falling from the room, the lowest paid have fallen, tech workers are “safe for now” but they are concerned and are trying to move to safer ground, and Bezos is in a spaceship above it all. People who think techies are well paid probably haven’t tried raising a family yet.

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> People who think techies are well paid probably haven’t tried raising a family yet. I started my own fintech startup by bootstrapping and working 90+ hours a week and I managed to survive in Boulder where/when the average house price was over 1 million USD, you will get no sympathy from me. My investments are the only thing that saved me, and I didn't have health benefits that entire time. I treaded water and almost drowned many times most of it's existence while disrupting an entire Industry in the process and eventually got head hunted by a mega corp. When will you realize that are not one of the tech oligarchs? What part of that don't you get yet? You're an expendable part of the equation. You guys have been coddled so much by these corps that insulate you from reality I almost wonder if you can see the trees from the forest and what your role is in all of this?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  We are making the same point. I think few people are under any illusions, the “comparing total compensation” movement probably came out of people wanting to get a bit more out of the ogilarchs for that comfortable retirement but not thinking they are one themselves (numerically there can only be so many)

silisili 4y ago

I get that and appreciate you calling it out, I'm not blind to how whiny it sounds. FWIW, I don't live in SV or make an SV salary. I've always tried to stay at 2x the prevailing local wage, so that my wife can stay home and take care of the house and kid with no worry. That's really my only motivation. When you're doing more than 2x, you feel ahead of the curve. When 2x comes at you fast, you start to sweat a little. But it's not lost on me that I'm lucky to be able to have such an existence.

eru 4y ago

> This is what I will never understand about most established tech people, they see all the widespread misery and poverty in SV and they still have the capacity to feel sorry for themselves for not making X times more than 'that other guy.' Out of sight, out of mind? What does it matter whether the misery and poverty is in your neighbourhood, or in the third world?

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> Out of sight, out of mind? What does it matter whether the misery and poverty is in your neighbourhood, or in the third world? Or a level self-abosrbedness that can only be defined as peak narcissism, really. I get wanting to be paid what you're worth, but when it comes to pretending you're some how any better than any other wage-slave is where I have trouble crossing over that level of hubris.

emteycz 4y ago

> This is what I will never understand about most established tech people, they see all the widespread misery and poverty in SV and they still have the capacity to feel sorry for themselves for not making X times more than 'that other guy. I don't understand this opinion. Why are the two feelings in conflict? I can be concerned for the people around me AND be concerned that I'm making less than X times more than the average. I really don't think there's anything good about equality if it means a programmer is making the same as the unqualified people - to me that signals a completely broken world that can't function. This kind of equality has been tried and failed spectacularly, and I live in a place that still feels the catastrophe today, 30 years post-facto, and it will be felt for the next 30 years at least, too. Overall, equality seems to me to be a misguided goal. We want people to have comfortable, healthy lives - I don't see how that relates to financial equality at all. Life needs to get cheaper so even the poor people can afford it - making everyone an equal millionaire will never work, that would just cause the prices to rise so much nobody could afford it and the meme of "equal misery" would become a reality once again. Let's talk about financial equality again once machines can do all the work.

nicoburns 4y ago
> Why are the two feelings in conflict? I can be concerned for the people around me AND be concerned that I'm making less than X times more than the average. Because as a tech worker your salary is likely already well above the level that it would need to fall in order for us to achieve meaningful level of wealth equality (not complete equality, but equal-ish) > making everyone an equal millionaire will never work Yes, exactly. But could work is having a scale of something like lower middle class to upper middle class incomes and getting rid of millionaires entirely (or making them as rare as billionaires are today). If we want to bring people out of poverty that money has to come from somewhere, and if you're making 6 figures some of it probably needs to come from you.
- emteycz 4y ago
  > Because as a tech worker your salary is likely already well above the level that it would need to fall in order for us to achieve meaningful level of wealth equality (not complete equality, but equal-ish) Why would you want that??? I think it's awesome the common Joe can learn programming on the internet and earn huge bucks. Why cancel that of all things? And then, I don't think your suggestion for equality would work. If my work was significantly taxed above $100K, I'd stop earning more at that point because work is very stressful to me and I'm not going to do it if I don't get the benefit of it; and I'd most definitely not go into any sort of risk (like starting a startup) in that world. If I can't even bang on a keyboard without someone feeling entitled to get the majority of my product, well then I'm not doing it, sorry. Everybody would lose - I'd pay much less taxes overall, and innovation from my side would grind to halt. (now I earn slightly less than $100k, but also live and work in Europe).

zivkovicp 4y ago

> because they have such a narrow limited set of skills If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

Melting_Harps 4y ago
Narrow =/= Easy The fact that you cannot see that is what I mean, you take what I said as a personal insult while simultaneously having the collective view that if 'poor people want to stop being poor they should learn to code like me' around here. It's cognitive dissonance and the part that I don't get is how you think people with other skills would want to do this even if given the choice were it not for the money. I'm a self-taught coder and don't regard myself highly. I will be honest, I never thought it was easy but it's also not difficult in the same way that biochemistry, nuclear chemistry or organic chemistry is difficult either: it's more tedious than it is anything else. It's all relative to what you've done before, I suppose. It's a lot of grinding, searching and revising and a war of attrition. All while putting up with people who quite frankly have the social skills of a lamppost and not giving into the urge of wanting to just quit and leave it all behind and start a hobby farm--as is so common in the tech circles towards the end.
- zivkovicp 4y ago
  I can see what you mean, I just don't agree about the skills. I agree to a large extent about the social skills, and even the hobby farm seeing as I've considered it more than once... but being good in IT requires a wide range of skills. It feels like most people that enter the field now are here because of the money, which is OK, but that doesn't mean they are any good, many are not, they are just taking advantage of a good opportunity. Again, that is OK. This is a gig that won't last forever, like having a popular YouTube channel, so there is no reason to read into it any more than "people are jumping on the bandwagon during a gold-rush", and no reason to get so upset about it. There is no more or less social inequality because of IT workers than there was during the "house flipping" trend from a few years back, Crypto, social media influencer channels, etc. There are a lot of good paying jobs, and no job will ever make you wealthy or powerful, so no reason to get worked up over ordinary working-class people (even if they make 6 figures, it's the 8+ figures that oppress). edit: spelling

weatherlite 4y ago

> This is what I will never understand about most established tech people, they see all the widespread misery and poverty in SV and they still have the capacity to feel sorry for themselves for not making X times more than 'that other guy.' As opposed to who exactly? The system is based on greed and maximizing profits/salaries/status/whatever. Are doctors/lawyers/financial people not behaving this way? Some doctors earn around one million USD a year in the U.S, that's money that makes insurance more expensive and unaffordable for everyone.

Melting_Harps 4y ago
> Some doctors earn around one million USD a year in the U.S, that's money that makes insurance more expensive and unaffordable for everyone. You're seriously not comparing yourself to physicians in level of importance in Society, are you?! As I said, after COVID we got a real wake up call of who mattered, and Nurses and Physicians deserve every penny that they get, its the system that is broken: see Stanford nurse strike. Moreover, it's actually not the physician salaries that keep things unaffordable, but the over-pricing of every bloated expense, procedure, medication, drug etc... that keeps it at those levels and simply because they can. Believe me, I just did 2 MRIs that I put off for several years because of COVID, physicians who I met before COVID who were doing well, and are probably better of financially now then before have been run-down significantly and they all had the same tells of using amphetamines/cocaine that I saw in my undergrad as pre-med students and bio students did the same courses. The real blame is at the administrative level, and accounting not the physician or nurse level. My MRI required that 2 specialists sign off on it before the Insurance approved it and everyone took a cut, such that by the time I got my MRI it was actually less (in the 1000s) than the 2 specialist visits to get that one MRI. I did this once again for my 2nd one and the same thing. I also got an EMG in 2019 and had to go for another one, it didn't matter that I had significant atrophy and weakness, not that I was approved for one before when it wasn't as bad as it is now. I had to go through the same process and everyone got their cut. So, again... no you're embellishing YOUR value if you think you are comparing apples to apples, its simply not the same thing at all. And none of you were working double shifts in an ER or Urgent care when COVID was at it's peak, or the large amount of attempted or successful suicides as lockdown, so really, get some perspective. You work on computeres, and many of you boast about really only doing 4 hours of work a day, the fact that you're posts counts are as high and still complaining about salary is testament of this very facade. And no, I don't agree, the 'system' was not based on greed, you chose to make it about greed because so many other have as well and is another matter entirely, because most physicians and some nurses are drowning in debt by the time they get to earning a decent salary. I agree they should optimize for that given those circumstances and many have after COVID and those who haven't are jumping ship or leaving the Industry all together, which is why we should pay them whatever they deserve/ask for (within reason, of course) to retain them. People aren't even aware of how many nurses are simply over the job entirely and will be quitting in masse.