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Yeah, it might be the new normal for a small rich subset of society. To say it’s the new normal full stop, is to ignore most of the working class. Ironically th

Yeah, it might be the new normal for a small rich subset of society. To say it’s the new normal full stop, is to ignore most of the working class. Ironically the group that’s usually wagging its finger at everyone else about privilege, does not realize its own privilege.

tempaccount420 4y ago
Rich? No one who works a 9-5 is rich. It's also definitely not a small subset.
- afavour 4y ago
  A reasonably levelled FAANG engineer working a 9-5 is absolutely rich by any objective standard. Applies to plenty of other industries as well.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    That's a pretty small subset of the 9-5 working pool.
    - afavour 4y ago
      Perhaps but the OP asserted that no one working a 9-5 is rich. I don’t think absolute terms like “rich” really help much in these discussions anyway. What is “rich”? I’d argue that people working 9-5 in an office are on average richer than the average retail employee by a fair margin even if they’re poorer than a CEO. It certainly feels a lot more relevant to the discussion at hand.
      - Clubber 4y ago
        Generalizations are a hard habit to get out of (no one working 9-5...) etc. Whenever I read that, I read "most." For what it's worth, my definition of rich has always been somebody who doesn't have to work. Having you and your family's livelihood dependent on the whims of an organization you don't have any control over is pretty daunting if you stop to think about it.
  - parthdesai 4y ago
    Not every software dev in Canada works in FAANG. Heck unless you're making more than 180k/year, it's going to be hard to afford a townhouse/house in Toronto. And not a lot of people make that money here.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      A LOT of Canadian software devs don't make anywhere near that money.
  - sologoub 4y ago
    That depends on tenure - if this hypothetical person has been in that position for many years AND has saved a significant part of their income, they may be “rich”. However, FAANG really exploded in size only recently (and then hit layoffs), FAANG jobs are concentrated in VHCOL locations, so savings aren’t great for all. So while their W2 may look impressive, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that they are “rich”. To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5. That doesn’t describe the vast majority of FAANG (or otherwise) employees. There certainly are outliers and success stories, but it’s not the default case.
    - afavour 4y ago
      > To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5. Perhaps this is a good example of the uselessness of the term “rich” when used absolutely because I would never interpret the word that way and we’d be talking past each other in any discussion!
      - medvezhenok 4y ago
        High income and rich are not the same thing) I agree with grandparent comment that rich/wealthy denotes an accumulated level of assets, not just a high income (which may or may not be transient)
        sologoub 4y ago
        Thank you for your comment! It spurred another thought of why high income != rich - high new income usually is associated with high loads of debt in US, e.g. a mortgage to buy a house. Such leverage puts the recipient of this new wealth (compared to generational wealth or even an outsized exit in tens of millions or higher) into an even more precarious position and ups the dependence on the employer. Which of course matches with most financial advice to watch the lifestyle creep.
      - sologoub 4y ago
        Agreed! Definitions matter, as another reply pointed out, I differentiate high income (a fairly attainable goal) with “rich”, or more specifically wealth, where the person is not dependent on the employer. Note that one cannot say “not dependent on others”, as people are always interdependent - stocks represent companies selling products, landlords depend on renters, etc
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    Are there objective standards for being rich? The best I can do is: you're rich if you don't have to work to maintain your lifestyle. Anything else is going to be relative to some arbitrary evaluation scheme.
    - hattmall 4y ago
      Rich is relative to others around you. Generally if you are in the top 25% you are rich, middle 50% you are middle class, bottom 25% you are poor. You can adjust those percents I suppose, but yes there is an objective standard for being rich and it depends on where you fit in the income and assets scale.
      - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
        This ranking... Is it income you're talking about? Because I think that's just a part of the picture. You can make a lot of money and still be poor if you spend all of it supporting a dependent with expensive healthcare needs, for instance.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    If you work for somebody else you aren't rich; you are making them rich.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    People who make $400M have a financial incentive to convince people who make $40K that people who make $400K are actually the rich, privileged ones.
    - drno123 4y ago
      People who make $400k and have it easy, want it a bit more easier so they convince those who make $40k that the problem is with 0.01% of the ultra-wealthy.
      - afavour 4y ago
        I’m sorry, how is the $400k worker convincing folks earning $40k of anything? As opposed to the ultra rich that literally own the news networks those folks watch?
  - smugma 4y ago
    There is no objective standard for rich. Rich people don’t call themselves rich. It’s all relative. Director at Google doesn’t feel rich. Neither does the nurse who makes $90K in a town where most of their friends make $35K or the two teacher couple who brings in $200K working in Redwood City.
  - 3vidence 4y ago
    These comments always irk me. I am a "reasonably leveled FAANG eng" in Canada. I have enough money to do the following: - rent a 2 bedroom apartment in a smaller city. - Order food from time to time. Things that are difficult to afford: - Any level of a car (currently car share). - I don't even look at house prices almost anywhere in my province. My effective tax rate is around 48% and with the way things keep increasing in price I will likely never own a home. Returning to the original question .... Am I rich?
    - afavour 4y ago
      Another reason why “rich” as an absolute term rarely makes sense. Are you rich? I don’t know. Are you richer than the person cooking the food you order from time to time? Almost definitely yes. Are you richer than most people who live around you? Likely still yes.
    - hattmall 4y ago
      Most likely, yes, you are. What is your salary? What is the median salary and household income. By world standards you are certainly very rich, but probably even for Canada yes, you are rich.
      - 3vidence 4y ago
        I guess by world standards working almost any job in G7 makes you relatively rich so I'm not sure that is a useful standard. Not sure if you're Canadian. But in case you're not most of Canadians net worth are tied up in housing that had been exploding in price the past few decades. For most normal jobs what you make is pretty irrelevant compared to what do you own. Many older teachers in Canada are far far richer than the equivalent of senior / staff SWEs. Canada has become a very difficult place to "earn" your way to becoming "rich" without inherited wealth. I think your definition of rich might be much closer to ... Maybe middle class (definitely not upper middle class). In addition to this I grew up in objective poverty by Canadian standards so I'm not sure what you are on about.
    - tensor 4y ago
      Assuming you make something like 130k CAD you are in the top 5% of earners in Canada and the top 1% in the world. Hacker news and other online communities are extremely biased in terms of representation of income. It's often hard for people to truly grasp how utterly poor the vast majority of the population is. This also leads the wealthy to be confused as to why tech workers are often so hated and also envied in the general population. Essentially we are the rich, meanwhile we pretend we are somehow "average" simply because we only look at those very few people even richer than us. For the actual average person these conversations are wealthy people complaining that they are not as wealthy as other wealthy people. I don't blame them for having no sympathy. Then you get articles and comments talking about the "end of in person work" pretending as though the majority of people who will never work from home because their jobs are such that they cannot are somehow simply not even people. It's not a good look.
  - aledalgrande 4y ago
    We are all rich if you look at the whole world https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/12/Global-inequality-in-1800-1975-and-2015.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/12/Global-inequality...
  - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    They've got more money, but they're still working a job for a wage for somebody else.
  - MH15 4y ago
    People complaining about income vs. wealth in the replies have a point, yes the real distinction of wealth is the ability to not work. I wonder if they've considered why themselves, as a reasonably leveled FAANG engineer, have far more capability to "become" rich than almost every other citizen.
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  If you have a 9-5 job you can do from home, go get Chick-fil-A for lunch and tell the person who serves you that you aren’t rich.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
Isn't that usually how societal norms work? They're not the result of a statistical calculation, they're expectations. Quite often they're unrealistic expectations that work to preserve the status quo to the detriment of the majority.

tempaccount420 4y ago

Rich? No one who works a 9-5 is rich. It's also definitely not a small subset.

afavour 4y ago
A reasonably levelled FAANG engineer working a 9-5 is absolutely rich by any objective standard. Applies to plenty of other industries as well.
- Clubber 4y ago
  That's a pretty small subset of the 9-5 working pool.
  - afavour 4y ago
    Perhaps but the OP asserted that no one working a 9-5 is rich. I don’t think absolute terms like “rich” really help much in these discussions anyway. What is “rich”? I’d argue that people working 9-5 in an office are on average richer than the average retail employee by a fair margin even if they’re poorer than a CEO. It certainly feels a lot more relevant to the discussion at hand.
    - Clubber 4y ago
      Generalizations are a hard habit to get out of (no one working 9-5...) etc. Whenever I read that, I read "most." For what it's worth, my definition of rich has always been somebody who doesn't have to work. Having you and your family's livelihood dependent on the whims of an organization you don't have any control over is pretty daunting if you stop to think about it.
- parthdesai 4y ago
  Not every software dev in Canada works in FAANG. Heck unless you're making more than 180k/year, it's going to be hard to afford a townhouse/house in Toronto. And not a lot of people make that money here.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    A LOT of Canadian software devs don't make anywhere near that money.
- sologoub 4y ago
  That depends on tenure - if this hypothetical person has been in that position for many years AND has saved a significant part of their income, they may be “rich”. However, FAANG really exploded in size only recently (and then hit layoffs), FAANG jobs are concentrated in VHCOL locations, so savings aren’t great for all. So while their W2 may look impressive, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that they are “rich”. To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5. That doesn’t describe the vast majority of FAANG (or otherwise) employees. There certainly are outliers and success stories, but it’s not the default case.
  - afavour 4y ago
    > To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5. Perhaps this is a good example of the uselessness of the term “rich” when used absolutely because I would never interpret the word that way and we’d be talking past each other in any discussion!
    - medvezhenok 4y ago
      High income and rich are not the same thing) I agree with grandparent comment that rich/wealthy denotes an accumulated level of assets, not just a high income (which may or may not be transient)
      - sologoub 4y ago
        Thank you for your comment! It spurred another thought of why high income != rich - high new income usually is associated with high loads of debt in US, e.g. a mortgage to buy a house. Such leverage puts the recipient of this new wealth (compared to generational wealth or even an outsized exit in tens of millions or higher) into an even more precarious position and ups the dependence on the employer. Which of course matches with most financial advice to watch the lifestyle creep.
    - sologoub 4y ago
      Agreed! Definitions matter, as another reply pointed out, I differentiate high income (a fairly attainable goal) with “rich”, or more specifically wealth, where the person is not dependent on the employer. Note that one cannot say “not dependent on others”, as people are always interdependent - stocks represent companies selling products, landlords depend on renters, etc
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  Are there objective standards for being rich? The best I can do is: you're rich if you don't have to work to maintain your lifestyle. Anything else is going to be relative to some arbitrary evaluation scheme.
  - hattmall 4y ago
    Rich is relative to others around you. Generally if you are in the top 25% you are rich, middle 50% you are middle class, bottom 25% you are poor. You can adjust those percents I suppose, but yes there is an objective standard for being rich and it depends on where you fit in the income and assets scale.
    - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
      This ranking... Is it income you're talking about? Because I think that's just a part of the picture. You can make a lot of money and still be poor if you spend all of it supporting a dependent with expensive healthcare needs, for instance.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  If you work for somebody else you aren't rich; you are making them rich.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ryandrake 4y ago
  People who make $400M have a financial incentive to convince people who make $40K that people who make $400K are actually the rich, privileged ones.
  - drno123 4y ago
    People who make $400k and have it easy, want it a bit more easier so they convince those who make $40k that the problem is with 0.01% of the ultra-wealthy.
    - afavour 4y ago
      I’m sorry, how is the $400k worker convincing folks earning $40k of anything? As opposed to the ultra rich that literally own the news networks those folks watch?
- smugma 4y ago
  There is no objective standard for rich. Rich people don’t call themselves rich. It’s all relative. Director at Google doesn’t feel rich. Neither does the nurse who makes $90K in a town where most of their friends make $35K or the two teacher couple who brings in $200K working in Redwood City.
- 3vidence 4y ago
  These comments always irk me. I am a "reasonably leveled FAANG eng" in Canada. I have enough money to do the following: - rent a 2 bedroom apartment in a smaller city. - Order food from time to time. Things that are difficult to afford: - Any level of a car (currently car share). - I don't even look at house prices almost anywhere in my province. My effective tax rate is around 48% and with the way things keep increasing in price I will likely never own a home. Returning to the original question .... Am I rich?
  - afavour 4y ago
    Another reason why “rich” as an absolute term rarely makes sense. Are you rich? I don’t know. Are you richer than the person cooking the food you order from time to time? Almost definitely yes. Are you richer than most people who live around you? Likely still yes.
  - hattmall 4y ago
    Most likely, yes, you are. What is your salary? What is the median salary and household income. By world standards you are certainly very rich, but probably even for Canada yes, you are rich.
    - 3vidence 4y ago
      I guess by world standards working almost any job in G7 makes you relatively rich so I'm not sure that is a useful standard. Not sure if you're Canadian. But in case you're not most of Canadians net worth are tied up in housing that had been exploding in price the past few decades. For most normal jobs what you make is pretty irrelevant compared to what do you own. Many older teachers in Canada are far far richer than the equivalent of senior / staff SWEs. Canada has become a very difficult place to "earn" your way to becoming "rich" without inherited wealth. I think your definition of rich might be much closer to ... Maybe middle class (definitely not upper middle class). In addition to this I grew up in objective poverty by Canadian standards so I'm not sure what you are on about.
  - tensor 4y ago
    Assuming you make something like 130k CAD you are in the top 5% of earners in Canada and the top 1% in the world. Hacker news and other online communities are extremely biased in terms of representation of income. It's often hard for people to truly grasp how utterly poor the vast majority of the population is. This also leads the wealthy to be confused as to why tech workers are often so hated and also envied in the general population. Essentially we are the rich, meanwhile we pretend we are somehow "average" simply because we only look at those very few people even richer than us. For the actual average person these conversations are wealthy people complaining that they are not as wealthy as other wealthy people. I don't blame them for having no sympathy. Then you get articles and comments talking about the "end of in person work" pretending as though the majority of people who will never work from home because their jobs are such that they cannot are somehow simply not even people. It's not a good look.
- aledalgrande 4y ago
  We are all rich if you look at the whole world https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/12/Global-inequality-in-1800-1975-and-2015.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/12/Global-inequality...
- doktorhladnjak 4y ago
  They've got more money, but they're still working a job for a wage for somebody else.
- MH15 4y ago
  People complaining about income vs. wealth in the replies have a point, yes the real distinction of wealth is the ability to not work. I wonder if they've considered why themselves, as a reasonably leveled FAANG engineer, have far more capability to "become" rich than almost every other citizen.
ghiculescu 4y ago
If you have a 9-5 job you can do from home, go get Chick-fil-A for lunch and tell the person who serves you that you aren’t rich.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

Isn't that usually how societal norms work? They're not the result of a statistical calculation, they're expectations. Quite often they're unrealistic expectations that work to preserve the status quo to the detriment of the majority.