> Remember the whole drive to push all the Techies out of SF? Remember rocks getting thrown at the Google busses? It's both.
This is primarily attributable to two causes:
1. distorted views that result directly from inequality and the extreme poverty some communities have: to the (stereo)typical Tenderloin resident, as person who is able to afford a modest 3/2 townhome appears to be vastly wealthy
2. the mistaken view of techies, themselves, as being in the same class as those who actually are wealthy, and presenting as such (including the disaffected/indifferent attitude towards those in even lower socioeconomic brackets), which reinforces (1)
> At the end of the day Bezos makes headlines but his personal largesse has very little effect on most people in the country. It has very little impact on the lives of folks getting "pushed out" of SF. That's the folks he employs.
That's so out of line with actual reality it's best classified as "not even wrong." I don't even know where to begin with it. The people pushing others out in SF are not Bezos' employees; they're a tiny, tiny fraction of tech workers, most of whom won a VC/IPO lottery.
Bezos and his social class benefit immensely from the lower socioeconomic classes in-fighting. For example, by some thinking paying a laborer more will lead to more inequality.
Sure, but reducing inequality is as much about pulling the bottom up as it is pulling the top down. If you bring people closer together you solve both (1) and (2).
The top 10% requires an income of about $160k/year. Quite a few software engineers in high and very-high cost of living areas make that--but the vast majority don't.
Look at the wage growth for the 90th - 95th (top 10% to top 5%): it's in the bottom.
The distribution of salary for Senior SWE is found, e.g., at https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/senior-soft.... The median is $115k, the 90% is $130k--still not the top 10%. Even when you bonuses the salary curve shifts right by less than 10% (e.g. median goes to about $116k, 90% outlier to $138k).
Some 4 million people in the US work as software engineers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...). FAANG accounts for, what, 1% - 2% of that? Maybe a bit more, but not much. The vast majority don't have high TC, most of them are paid a flat salary with a modest bonus and either have ESPPs or no equity at all.
Software engineers are laborers, in effectively the same social class as manual laborers. Our economic circumstances are better, but not that much better.
Your comment is a great example of how the huge inequality gaps and the infotainment media have distorted perceptions among workers.
This is primarily attributable to two causes:
1. distorted views that result directly from inequality and the extreme poverty some communities have: to the (stereo)typical Tenderloin resident, as person who is able to afford a modest 3/2 townhome appears to be vastly wealthy
2. the mistaken view of techies, themselves, as being in the same class as those who actually are wealthy, and presenting as such (including the disaffected/indifferent attitude towards those in even lower socioeconomic brackets), which reinforces (1)
> At the end of the day Bezos makes headlines but his personal largesse has very little effect on most people in the country. It has very little impact on the lives of folks getting "pushed out" of SF. That's the folks he employs.
That's so out of line with actual reality it's best classified as "not even wrong." I don't even know where to begin with it. The people pushing others out in SF are not Bezos' employees; they're a tiny, tiny fraction of tech workers, most of whom won a VC/IPO lottery.
Bezos and his social class benefit immensely from the lower socioeconomic classes in-fighting. For example, by some thinking paying a laborer more will lead to more inequality.