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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

Its like they see developers and drivers as two different species. For every twenty something dev that makes $132K, there is a fourty something trying to rebuild a life post-trauma, doing their best to net $13K. Since insurance and gas aren't cheaper, the driver now will net $6K next year, while the dev would jump ship to another company if they didn't get a $6K bonus. While my head understands the economic principles that drive that reality, my heart doesn't understand how such a thing needs to happen.

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Same with canteen workers, janitors and so forth. It's the reality of this economy without any intervention.

>my heart doesn't understand how such a thing needs to happen.

That's why developers, who have the economic leverage, should stand up for everyone working at their companies, including staff that isn't involved in technical work.

So would the tech workers cut 10% of their salary and gift it to those working for low pay in other roles?

I think it's overwhelmingly no. The option where the company shareholders take less profit is not even on the table - and that's what needs tackling, and the only way to tackle that is via a mix of govt welfare and unions. But the cultural narrative has shifted to the right so much that even mentioning the word union will cause a chilling effect on your career. No ones' gonna do it.

If I gave up 10% of my salary and someone else making much less got to raise of the equivalent of my 10%, I'd do it in a heart beat.

Couldn't you easily do exactly that any time you want?

Isn't that just called charity?

The cultural narrative has shifted to the right?

All I hear from my red-state family is how basically the world is coming to an end because the country has veered so far to the left.

I live in SF and things here always seem to be drifting leftward as well, but of course this is probably left HQ so I guess that's not surprising.

That said, some of my farthest left friends in San Francisco are convinced that some kind of extremist right-win revolution is about to happen, and one of them literally moved to Canada in fear of it.

I don't say any of this to disagree with you. Rather, I say this because I feel like something weird is going on in the world. There doesn't seem to be much consensus about what's going on around us - like people aren't living in the same reality.

As for me it seems like mostly life is just going on like it always has - but I deleted social media a while back and quit watching cable news... I think unplugging from that made me realize it's all a giant circus and a lot of people are getting roped into various factional hallucinations and sort of losing touch with reality. But I just don't get how it's become so pervasive, and it leaves me questioning how you can even know if anything is true or not.

Okay, side tangent over... carry on...

Deleting social media is, I think, one of the absolute best things one can do for their mental health right about now.

Well basically all the metrics, A/B testing and optimization technologies built by companies like Google, Facebook and a load of other smaller tech startups found their way into the hands of people running media companies. Google Analytics probably did the most to set this trend as blog after blog started using it to understand how to drive traffic.

Now that the media has these tools, their content becomes subservient to getting those eyeballs, clicks, time on page and repeat visits.

What has all this taught us? That nothing drives metrics like anger and rage, so anger and rage is what the opinion industry produces. Furthermore, cognitive dissonance costs you eyeballs, so the tendency is to further self censor your content to avoid anything that might upset the increasingly sheltered worldview of your audience.

It doesn’t need to, but that same developer that will jump ship for a pay rise will also jump ship if their pay is cut to afford higher rates for the workers bringing the actual value to the company.

Why should I take a 50% pay cut just so the people driving the cars earning our incomes can afford to eat?

Because the people that pay your income so that you can afford to eat also make an income so that they can afford to eat.

As a developer who could "jump ship" to get a pay raise, I feel like I'm at a point where I understand too much is too much and there are a billion other people who need out attention. You don't need seven figures, no one does. We all want different things. So why not let people respectfully wish better for themselves?

honest question, would you be willing to do exactly that - jump ship then give your too much to e.g. charity?

won't help systematically but it seems like a way to personally work towards the mission you've outlined.

Yeah this has me thinking that Uber doesn’t have a long time viable business model, unless driverless gets a real move on.

I think it’s obscene how much I make for what I do, having grown up in a blue collar family, working jobs that are far harder than what I do now, making minimum wage. If I didn’t have a family, I’d probably still rather be a software developer at $10 an hour instead of working at a KFC kitchen making what I make as a software developer now.

I don’t know what you do but to me working as a programmer, thinking all day and solving problems, is much harder than just driving around people.

Programming is certainly harder than most jobs in the sense that fewer people are capable of doing it, which is the one that matters for economics. That doesn't mean other jobs are not harder in other ways that matter too.

> not harder in other ways that matter too.

those ways don't matter to the company doing the paying of wages. The only "way" that matters is the scarcity of people willing to perform said job. This is what our society has currently come to, and no individual can make that change without making a personal sacrifice.

I acknowledged that:

> which is the one that matters for economics

Yeh but so is loading 1000 packages into 4 or 5 trucks. Or 2500 packages into an 18 wheeler.

You can load packages into an 18 wheeler for 20 years and you wont really learn much. A new person can come in tomorrow and do the same job pretty much without any learning. When you work as an engineer you constantly have to learn and keep your knowledge up to date on top of that.

Hard, yes, but you should start a business paying people developer salaries to load and unload boxes and we will see how well that works out for you. Also that job is soon to be an anachronism - robots are perfectly suited to replace humans for this task.

I actually doubt they will replace the loader. Not until they having something as dexterous as a human hand. Some functions, such as belt splitting is already replacing humans but there are no plans to replace the loaders. It requires too much human intuition at the moment for the machines to handle.

yeh but if u work for financial firm then u see that devs make maybe 50% or less of what investors make.

There is nothing stopping us from legislating minimum rates just like we legislate minimum wages.

There's also no stopping the resulting inflation. If you want to solve the cost of living problem, you're better off focusing on reducing the costs instead of raising the amount of money available. Housing costs in many housing supply constrained markets will easily absorb any increase in median income income in those markets.

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