7 ms·

It's a class war. Lets call it what it is. One side is literally trying to kill the other. Whether you choke off oxygen or financial means to survival... you'r

• marcinzm 3y ago
  Class warfare against those making $400k/year...
  • Dig1t 3y ago
    By those making many millions per year. Yes. They are two classes of people, albeit the 400k class is not the lowest on the totem pole.
  • jwestbury 3y ago
    Yes, because we're threatening to become a true middle class again. Don't fool yourself: Software engineers are working class.
    • readthenotes1 3y ago
      Just because you work doesn't mean you're "middle class". If you're making $400k/year, you are upper class (on the income scale). $65k is the middle of "middle class".
      • seo-speedwagon 3y ago
        Your definition of “class” seems to be a kind of vague proxy for “income”. The original comment was using a more accurate definition aligning more with a capital vs labor distinction: are you paid in wages or are you paid in profits?
        • readthenotes1 3y ago
          "middle class" was the starting point of the discussion, with the poster trying to make believe that being a worker means you are middle class As I commented somewhere else, if you are making 400k a year and are not investing the surplus income as capital for someone else's business then you are probably not making good life decisions. You certainly are making enough to be a rentier
          • JeremyNT 3y ago
            It's a case of the terminology of "class" becoming muddled, which creates such divisions. "Middle class" is the wrong concept here - capital versus labor is what matters. Somebody in the labor class making that kind of money may be able to springboard themselves into the capital class by investment, but they aren't automatically there based solely on their income.
      • hedora 3y ago
        The middle class has shrunk: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a... See section 2. The trend is pretty clear: The upper class is transferring wealth from the middle class. So, demanding that firms cut wages on middle class workers has been standard practice for decades. They're running out of money to extract from there, so they're going after the bottom half of the uppe class next. I suggest joining a startup; investors that are willing to put cash into companies in times like this end up getting outsized returns on investment (since anyone that can leave the big companies does, the big company's R&D projects get cancelled during downturns, and general morale issues prevent minor product improvements from shipping). (Also, median of middle class is $90K, and median of upper is $219K. Lower class is $29K. If they broke upper class into 2-4 separate tiers, there'd also be a clear skew in wage growth toward the top of the upper class.)
        • claytongulick 3y ago
          The TLDR of that article is that most of the "shrinking middle class" can be explained by changing demographics in the US - i.e. the country is getting older. Older people, pre-retirement, generally earn more then younger people. As it should be - they've spent their lives growing their net worth and gaining experience. Most "class warfare" can be explained by this - except that it doesn't get clickbait outrage reaction to say "older, experienced people are wealthier than young people starting their careers". It's much more exciting to skew charts and graphs to show massive wealth disparity, as if there's a sinister cabal of wealthy folks that for some reason don't want others to succeed. These charts are utterly meaningless if they aren't broken down by age group. You're putting someone who has 30+ years of career growth against someone out of high school and then screaming about wealth disparity. The article itself even points this out - they say most of the loss of money in middle income was made up for in the 45-65 year old bracket. After 65 (surprise) when folks are retired, this drops off. The issue isn't some sort of "class warfare" boogeyman. The issue is that we've made it damn near impossible to have a large family these days, and our population demographics are reflecting that, along with income. Also note: the article doesn't talk about absolute numbers or wealth. It's all percentile stuff. It's easy to play statistics tricks with that.
      • piva00 3y ago
        If you depend on a salary to make ends meet you're working class. This further division of the working class into upper and lower classes based on income is just another method to implement divide-and-conquer by pitting workers against themselves. Yes, software engineers earn a lot more than other salaried professions, it does not mean that software engineers control the means of production. Until a salaried worker earn enough to become part of the capital class and not need to work anymore we are all part of the working class. Blue-collar/lower income workers might take offense in that, as they'd look at someone making US$200-400k/year as part of the elite, it does not mean that workers earning that shouldn't look at themselves as they are: workers, subjected to an elite class controlling the means of production and hence, their lives.
        • throwaway6734 3y ago
          >If you depend on a salary to make ends meet you're working class. Then its a meaningless phrase
          • piva00 3y ago
            If you own capital (factories, businesses, capital investments) you don't depend on a salary, you're not working class... It's not meaningless, the division is pretty clear. Do you depend on an employer to afford your life? If you got disabled and couldn't work a single day again in your life, would you be able to afford it without stress? There it is, that's the meaning of "you depend on salary"... Edit: I also noticed that usually your comments don't really add much to discussions on HN, could you change that behaviour a little bit, please?
            • readthenotes1 3y ago
              The people that I know that own the means of production work extraordinarily hard. Long-term disability insurance has nothing to do with whether you are an owner or a worker, but whether you make enough money to afford the insurance premium - - and you can earn that money either by salary or dividends (and their proxies).
      • pjmlp 3y ago
        Most software developers across the globe aren't doing FAANG salaries.
    • dcveloper 3y ago
      LOL. Maybe the professional class (doctors, lawyers) but most real working-class people do not bucket themselves in the category as the professional class. Yes, you are all salaried, but they don't get 6 figure RSU's or bonuses.
      • DanHulton 3y ago
        This is just class infighting, though. If you don't own the capital, you're labour. Yes, some labour is paid better, sometimes much better! But if you can be fired, you're labour, and fighting with other labour is counter-productive. Instead of scrapping with someone who makes twice your wage for half your work, we should all be scrapping with those who own the capital, who are profiting from our labour, who even allow for such crappy jobs in the first place. We should ALL be paid well and have respectful work accommodations.
        • readthenotes1 3y ago
          If you make $400k/yr, you are a fool if you have not invested the large surplus. And that investment is the capital for someone else's business. And you don't have a large surplus at that salary, you are also a fool.
          • birdyrooster 3y ago
            You are missing the entire point that it doesn't necessarily have to be this way and use it to finger wag a straw man.
      • pydry 3y ago
        It's still people who own vs. people who earn. Those people on 400k are on the same side of the capital divide as people who work at Starbucks. Hedgies are trying to take a cut of both of their wages so they can buy more cocaine. Obviously theyd prefer us to think we're special little creative snowflakes who don't need union membership like a common old factory workers. Or Tom Cruise. Or the hollywood writers who just won a massive victory.
      • 3y ago
    • throwaway6734 3y ago
      you are deeply out of touch with how most americans live
      • aaomidi 3y ago
        Working class is defined as needing to work to live. Even people making 400K are still working class. Now between the working class, there’s a lot of difference too. The thing is, that difference is on an entirely different scale than the difference between the working class and the owner class.
        • tedivm 3y ago
          The 400k is a red herring anyways. Not every engineer makes that, and not ever person who laid off was an engineer. The layoffs affected recruiters, marketing, sales, and a ton of areas that were not engineers. Lower level engineers were also targeted more than the higher level engineers, and even more importantly the hiring freezes and reductions blocked a ton of new grads from getting jobs.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • Izkata 3y ago
          There's a few definitions for it, the one I think most people default to is jobs that require physical labor.
          • aaomidi 3y ago
            Are teachers not working class then? How about secretaries? That’s a silly distinction for what “working class” is.
            • Izkata 3y ago
              Secretaries would fall under professional class, people who work at a desk. Not sure where teachers would be, probably something similar.
    • hn_version_0023 3y ago
      Buddy, I’m a data center tech. I rack & stack and run cable. I am working class. You guys in your nice offices with catered lunches, free drinks, unlimited sick time, RSUs, bonuses, etc? That isn’t working class. Thats the 1% from where I sit.
      • maximinus_thrax 3y ago
        > That isn’t working class. Thats the 1% from where I sit. Your perception doesn't agree with reality. First of all, you need to earn at least double that to qualify for 1%. But that's a different story, as income is not what makes someone 'working class'. If you MUST work in order to survive, you are working class, which is the case even for people making $400k/year. > catered lunches, free drinks, unlimited sick time, RSUs, bonuses, etc You're kind of working against your argument here. These things disappear when you lose your job, hence they need to work in order to have them, hence they're working class. If you need someone to direct your anger towards, it's the people with trust funds, not the W2 workers who are making more than you. Think of it this way. Who benefits the most if your income goes down or stagnates? Other W2 workers? Or someone else who just loves it when you direct your energy against other workers?
        • hn_version_0023 3y ago
          There is no shortage of people to direct my anger towards. This community specifically is responsible for the creation, wide adoption of smartphones and the endless doom-scrolling addiction we’re all subjected to now. My ire is limitless; plenty to go around. I don’t require your permission or sign-off on my emotions.
          • maximinus_thrax 3y ago
            > There is no shortage of people to direct my anger towards. This community specifically is responsible for the creation, wide adoption of smartphones and the endless doom-scrolling addiction we’re all subjected to now. You're responsible as well, for supporting the infrastructure enabling these efforts. But don't conflate issues. We were talking about whether or not someone working at BigCo making $400k/year is working class or not. They are, even if they're not blue-collar workers. I don't really give a damn who or what you're literally angry about, I was just using a figure of speech.
  • _jal 3y ago
    Yes, but wage-compression is a thing. It is the inverse of minimum wage increases putting upward pressure on incomes above them. That is one reason why solidarity works.
  • booleandilemma 3y ago
    There are about 4 million developers in the USA. They're not all making $400k/year. A couple thousand at the top don't represent all of us. We need to unionize, the sooner the better.
    • Spivak 3y ago
      Yep, I swear people see one SWE at Google making crazy amounts of money and forget that that's the far right of the distribution. Your typical SWE pay is $75-$150k which don't let the zeros fool you is working class. The fact that crazy high inflation and housing costs has made everyone so much fucking poorer overnight and changed the relative comparison doesn't change the absolute one. Here's what $100k is depending on where your perception of money is anchored. Baby Boomeer: $100k would have been $12k when you were growing up. Gen X: That's about $35k Millennials: That's about $63k
  • tedivm 3y ago
    This comment can only be made by someone who isn't paying any attention at all. The layoffs affected recruiters, marketing, sales, and a ton of areas that were not engineers. Lower level engineers were also targeted more than the higher level engineers, and even more importantly the hiring freezes and reductions blocked a ton of new grads from getting jobs. As a 400k/year engineer I was fine. My colleagues unfortunately were not.
  • seo-speedwagon 3y ago
    That’s right
  • fullshark 3y ago
    What happens if those making 400k a year in order to buy a shack in a HCOL area don’t actually have to do that? They can be free to work on what they want instead of adshit or high frequency algorithms and actually maybe work for themselves?
  • rewmie 3y ago
    > Class warfare against those making $400k/year... I don't know what point you thought you were making. In the very least, middle class is still a class.
  • axus 3y ago
    In theory those making more money would be the most threatening, having enough extra money to translate into political power. Also in theory, pensioners and the insured are the beneficiaries of hedge fund profits via their institutions investments. But nobody is policing the thoughts of the fund managers.
    • tivert 3y ago
      > In theory those making more money would be the most threatening, having enough extra money to translate into political power. In theory. In reality, higher salary workers are easier to propagandize, because they have a tendency to LARP "being a capitalist" with their 401k. They also tend to be modestly smart technicians, which generally gives them a greater capacity for self-deception and delusion. The end result is that most of them politically self-neutralize.
  • wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    You got a source for that number? Not all devs are working in the bay area. Some of us are out here in middle america working for far less. Nice try at invalidating the pain of others though...
  • tivert 3y ago
    >> It's a class war. > Class warfare against those making $400k/year... IIRC, if your income comes from wages or salary, you're part of the working class. It doesn't matter how much you make. Wall Street wants to kick your ass to the curb and replace you with a robot just the same as a dude working in a factory. However, when people make salaries that high, they often confuse themselves for capitalists.
    • Swizec 3y ago
      Ideally at that income level you’re buying your way into becoming a capitalist. You should be able to make it into the capitalist class in about 10 years with that kind of salary.
      • kridsdale3 3y ago
        I agree. Everyone making that much money (as I do) can decide for themselves: Do I want to live in the Bay Area and drive a Model X, or do I want to negotiate myself to a cheaper state, drive a 10 year old Toyota (perfectly fine! More reliable than a Tesla!), and buy $250k of equities per year, thus buying their way in to the true capitalist class in half the time that real working class people have to stick to their careers? It is your choice!
    • kylestlb 3y ago
      Bingo. If a large majority of your income comes from selling your labor for a wage, you are working class. Lower/middle/upper are mostly arbitrary definitions to divide and conquer the working class as a whole. And it works.
  • kevingadd 3y ago
    The people targeted by MS's layoffs weren't making 400k/year.
  • gorbachev 3y ago
    If you think this is what all software engineers make, you have a very small bubble you live in.
• phailhaus 3y ago
  This is hyperbole to the point of self-parody.
  • dirtybirdnj 3y ago
    Care to elaborate? Smug comment without any substance isn't super useful.
    • phailhaus 3y ago
      I don't think it requires elaboration. Claiming that firing people is equivalent to killing them is hyperbole. Claiming that we're close to literally executing employees in the office is absolutely ridiculous. These kinds of comments completely derail any sort of rational conversation about labor rights.
      • dirtybirdnj 3y ago
        > Claiming that we're close to literally executing employees in the office is absolutely ridiculous. I think from a "do we care about the people we employ" perspective the whole idea of laying people off and then hiring them back is callous at best, and psychopathic / sociopathic at worst. The conditions these actions create at the companies people are employed at are toxic and negative. I've never had a 400k salary, I've barely cracked six figures. The reality is that the class war actions taken have decimated the middle and lower end of the tech job market and people like me are just plain fucked with little options other than burger king when you get done doom scrolling the same 10 job boards every day. It doesn't matter if you've done DBA or are a competent developer with real world experience, once you get kicked down the ladder you are black-marked for life. Good luck getting back up when the ladder has been set on fire and the ashes dropped on your head.
        • phailhaus 3y ago
          This has nothing to do with "class warfare". Big companies are capable of hiring thousands of people, and have the cash to do so. If they decide that they no longer need those people, they will fire them. At no point is some mustache-twirling villain "plotting against" you. They do not care about you. You have skills, they hired you for those skills; they no longer need your skills, so you are let go with benefits (because we fought for those). What policies are you actually proposing? Because I really don't know where you're going with this. Ban firing? Forced hiring?
• boringg 3y ago
  No it's not -- stop trying to seed class warfare in this thread.
  • dirtybirdnj 3y ago
    The class war was seeded at an event in Jackson Hole actually, according to this thread
• RandomLensman 3y ago
  If you had done a cost cutting exercise yourself as an executive, I doubt you would see it as entertainment or fun.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • dirtybirdnj 3y ago
    Did you read the part about Satya Nadella getting himself a big fat bonus while laying off tons of people? Doesn't seem like this "difficult decision" really hurt him that much... in fact he seems to feel justified in being rewarded for these actions. Spoils of war? Cost of doing business? What excuses are we using to discard ethics today?
    • RandomLensman 3y ago
      Why shouldn't running a large cost cutting exercise be rewarded (provided it was profit accretive)? Not that easy to do - a lot firms struggle with those. There is a different discussion on the level of executive compensation. In the end, it really comes down to what you think a stock corporation is for. If it is some sort of profit maximizer, then cost control is part of running it.
      • dirtybirdnj 3y ago
        Why should the financial gains of the company be completely disconnected from how it treats the people it employs? There is a perverse lack of incentive for people at the top to be good to people at the bottom. If a CEO is rewarded handsomely for tricking / deceiving a large population of his employees (at the expense of the employees, benefit enjoyed exclusively by company) should this now be seen as an accepted business practice? How slippery do we have to get this slope before it just turns into a meat grinder where all issues ethical or otherwise uncomfortable are just hand-waved away into "but it's profitable!" sausage?
        • 3y ago
• ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  You're on a site for venture capitalists, wannabe startup founders and employees hoping to strike it rich, employees of FAANG and other big tech companies who gained much of their wealth through their stock grants and options (i.e. are making money from growth of their capital) and are expecting sympathy for class warfare rhetoric? Good luck with that. Not to mention people whose salaries are 3x, 4x, 5x or even more than the median wage attempting to LARP as the oppressed proletariat is cringe inducing as heck. If all out class warfare broke out, the proletariat knows darned well that we're not feeling anything like the financial pain that they've endured. We'd be treated as enemies just as much as the wealthy and it's much, much easier for a mob to get their hands on you and I than it is for the truly wealthy.
  • kridsdale3 3y ago
    In the real class war bloodbath, software engineers are Pol Pot's "anyone with glasses".
• dang 3y ago
  Please don't post flamewar rhetoric to HN. It leads to predictable, dumbed-down discussion, and we want the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • dirtybirdnj 3y ago
    I appreciate this constructive criticism. It's frustrating to feel targeted by the actions in the article but I can see how my comment is more antagonistic.
    • dang 3y ago
      Appreciated. Yes, following the HN guidelines does involve learning to tolerate frustration, until it either goes away or transmutes into a more interesting comment. It takes work and practice. We're all learning this together as a community (definitely including me).
      • dirtybirdnj 3y ago
        My comment got engagement but I regret that I missed an opportunity to be more serious about the important issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658410 I doubt this will get the engagement my flagged comment got, but let me know what you think.