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The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid wel

The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.

timkam 1y ago
Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.
- ath3nd 1y ago
  Is the wealth of the average software developer ($122 000/y) in the US closer to the wealth of: A) a coal miner with $60 000/y salary B) Elon Musk: $381 000 000 000 Sources: - https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO0,10.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO... - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956.... Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of: A) a worker at Walmart B) Mark Zuckerberg? > Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.
  - _9ptr 1y ago
    I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound. Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump. Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.
    - vkou 1y ago
      Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here. When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker. If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour. Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
      - dmoy 1y ago
        Yea for concrete numbers: If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary). If you have under that threshold (in a big expensive US city), you are probably still working class. A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30 years depending on pay and savings rate. But also a lot of software engineers operate their budgets almost paycheck-to-paycheck, and will never get there.
        zeroonetwothree 1y ago
        I don’t see how something like 160-320k income without working is a “modest life”. By any absolute standard you have it better than almost every human that has ever lived.
  - hackernoops 1y ago
    And for all of Mark Zuckerberg's wealth and property holdings, it wasn't enough and didn't stop him from trying to take sacred land from native Hawaiians on the island of Kauai.
  - VirusNewbie 1y ago
    Let me ask you this, do software engineers in unions enjoy more benefits and compensation than those not in Unions?
    - ipaddr 1y ago
      They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union. Most importantly more protections. Comparing those in unions who are more likely to be in the video game making or industry or government to faangs like Amazon where you work day and night for a 4 year vesting offer that pays out very little until the 4th year and where on average most worker work less than 2 years at Amazon.
      - VirusNewbie 1y ago
        >They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union. Please tell me a union SWE shop that has better benefits and comp than I get?
    - ath3nd 1y ago
      A teacher out of union is still as much working class as is a teacher in a union. We software engineers are working class because we have to work for our money. Do you own businesses, land, investments, and other forms of capital that generate wealth independently of direct labor? Enough wealth so you don't have to work for the foreseeable future? Is this the average software engineer for you (in or out of a union)? Because that's the definition of NOT being a part of the working class.
  - strken 1y ago
    This feels like the wrong question to ask. Someone with a net worth of a "mere" $2 million is also closer to the coal miner, but at a 3% per year withdrawal rate, has a passive income equal to the coal miner's full time work week without lifting a finger. I don't think it makes sense to group the "don't have to go to work anymore" people with the "can buy anything" people, but they don't have a lot in common with the working class, either. To what extent are SWEs working class? I guess that depends on how many of them still have to go to work. A salary of $350k certainly puts you on the road to never having to work again.
  - ta1243 1y ago
    > Is the wealth You use that word, it does not mean what you think it means when you immediately talk about income.
- rynohack 1y ago
  Working class is not defined by income level. The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears. That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.
  - f33d5173 1y ago
    The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.
    - dttze 1y ago
      Yeah, one is right and the other is bs pushed to divide people
    - closewith 1y ago
      The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        This also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, managers and executives, none of whom are traditionally thought of as "working class"
        dragonwriter 1y ago
        That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.) American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class. This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.
Spooky23 1y ago
Engineering is always boom/bust. Ask a retired aerospace engineer who got purged in the 90s. Technology always automates jobs away. I had a dedicated database systems team 25 years ago that was larger than an infrastructure team managing 1000x more stuff today. Dev teams are bloated in most places, today.

The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.

timkam 1y ago

Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.

ath3nd 1y ago
Is the wealth of the average software developer ($122 000/y) in the US closer to the wealth of: A) a coal miner with $60 000/y salary B) Elon Musk: $381 000 000 000 Sources: - https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO0,10.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO... - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956.... Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of: A) a worker at Walmart B) Mark Zuckerberg? > Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.
- _9ptr 1y ago
  I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound. Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump. Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.
  - vkou 1y ago
    Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here. When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker. If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour. Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
    - dmoy 1y ago
      Yea for concrete numbers: If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary). If you have under that threshold (in a big expensive US city), you are probably still working class. A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30 years depending on pay and savings rate. But also a lot of software engineers operate their budgets almost paycheck-to-paycheck, and will never get there.
      - zeroonetwothree 1y ago
        I don’t see how something like 160-320k income without working is a “modest life”. By any absolute standard you have it better than almost every human that has ever lived.
- hackernoops 1y ago
  And for all of Mark Zuckerberg's wealth and property holdings, it wasn't enough and didn't stop him from trying to take sacred land from native Hawaiians on the island of Kauai.
- VirusNewbie 1y ago
  Let me ask you this, do software engineers in unions enjoy more benefits and compensation than those not in Unions?
  - ipaddr 1y ago
    They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union. Most importantly more protections. Comparing those in unions who are more likely to be in the video game making or industry or government to faangs like Amazon where you work day and night for a 4 year vesting offer that pays out very little until the 4th year and where on average most worker work less than 2 years at Amazon.
    - VirusNewbie 1y ago
      >They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union. Please tell me a union SWE shop that has better benefits and comp than I get?
  - ath3nd 1y ago
    A teacher out of union is still as much working class as is a teacher in a union. We software engineers are working class because we have to work for our money. Do you own businesses, land, investments, and other forms of capital that generate wealth independently of direct labor? Enough wealth so you don't have to work for the foreseeable future? Is this the average software engineer for you (in or out of a union)? Because that's the definition of NOT being a part of the working class.
- strken 1y ago
  This feels like the wrong question to ask. Someone with a net worth of a "mere" $2 million is also closer to the coal miner, but at a 3% per year withdrawal rate, has a passive income equal to the coal miner's full time work week without lifting a finger. I don't think it makes sense to group the "don't have to go to work anymore" people with the "can buy anything" people, but they don't have a lot in common with the working class, either. To what extent are SWEs working class? I guess that depends on how many of them still have to go to work. A salary of $350k certainly puts you on the road to never having to work again.
- ta1243 1y ago
  > Is the wealth You use that word, it does not mean what you think it means when you immediately talk about income.
rynohack 1y ago
Working class is not defined by income level. The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears. That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.
- f33d5173 1y ago
  The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.
  - dttze 1y ago
    Yeah, one is right and the other is bs pushed to divide people
  - closewith 1y ago
    The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      This also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, managers and executives, none of whom are traditionally thought of as "working class"
      - dragonwriter 1y ago
        That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.) American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class. This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.

Spooky23 1y ago

Engineering is always boom/bust. Ask a retired aerospace engineer who got purged in the 90s. Technology always automates jobs away. I had a dedicated database systems team 25 years ago that was larger than an infrastructure team managing 1000x more stuff today. Dev teams are bloated in most places, today.