We need to get a handle on inflation and the housing bubble first before we can figure out what reasonable salaries are again, and that’s going to hurt all around.
The fact is that in the modern day even on a FAANG salary a lot of people cannot afford to buy a home of their own. And the salary band at those companies is incredibly wide, owing in fact due to the wide disconnect in salary between engineers, middle management and the c-suite.
But how do we do this?
[0] : https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
[1] : https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
I'm not a FAANG worker; I make well below what they make. I simply do not ascribe to the crab-in-a-pot mentality that a lot of posters here seem to have in attempt to further divide what is ultimately a large range of middle class workers. Total compensation also only matters depending on the total CoL because a lot of those companies require you to live in areas with incredibly high rent, especially with the attempt to remove remote work. And even with FAANG the salary between an engineer at Amazon and one at Google is going to vastly differ, especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at.
For reference, Pew Research defines middle class as 1.66 - 2x the median salary in America. That would make most tech workers middle class, and FAANG engineers in the lower upper class. In places like San Francisco where the cost of living is significantly higher, you would need to be earning ~230k a year to be in the upper middle class [1]. Though that's by one narrow definition.
The fact is that even your senior tech worker making ~200k a year is barely a blip on the radar compared to how much executives and investors are stealing. If you want to fall for their rhetoric and wonder why things are getting worse for everyone then you shouldn't be surprised.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/02/middle-class-income-in-major...
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
In your CNBC article everything is based on household income. Many SWEs would be classed as not middle class based on their own income let alone household income.
The median SWE salary in the US is $110k: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/....
If you take increased salary due to location and partner salary into account, the majority of SWEs are easily upper middle class.
> In places like San Francisco where the cost of living is significantly higher, you would need to be earning ~230k a year to be in the upper middle class
A solo entry level FAANG engineer basically qualifies for upper middle class. Add a partner and you're definitely upper middle class.
> And even with FAANG the salary between an engineer at Amazon and one at Google is going to vastly differ, especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at
What are you talking about with "especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at"? As far as I've seen Retail vs AWS doesn't have different comp.
Google and Amazon also have pretty similar comp: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Amazon&track=Software....
Their comp bands likely have a lot of overlap. Differences are more likely to be based on negotiation than working for Google vs Amazon.
My argument has always been that they exist in the middle class. The fact that median income being low isn't indicative of them not being middle class, but rather that the continued squeeze on salary among all middle class workers has resulted in a shrinking of who actually is middle class and what that income means.
> Sites like what you share are often going to be representative of the upper band of the salary range since that's who self-reports
Many people have corroborated that levels.fyi is accurate for large tech companies like Amazon and Google. It's accurate for my company as well.
If FAANG comp is middle class, at what point does it become upper middle/upper class? I believe ~$500k is 1% income in the US. Some SWEs who are "workers" break that. Is someone who has top 1% income really middle class?
A lot of SWEs also receive equity compensation (I.e. ownership), which is very much not a middle class phenomenon.
The point is that salaries should have increased for everyone. Middle class is not struggling to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck. It is living a modest life with modest savings and a discretionary income.
This random article claims the 90th percentile in the Bay Area is $384K. https://www.kqed.org/news/11799308/bay-area-has-highest-inco...
I am not sure how that helps make this clearer though. It almost doesn’t matter at this point. We all know making $55K/yr in the Bay Area is rough. People are getting screwed over.
From that perspective, yes a lot of people make less, but that just means life is becoming impossible for most people making normal salaries.
Not really. Housing is simply becoming more expensive to construct, even in places where land is cheap and building regulations are open. But let's say even if NIMBYism was significant factor: why are all the good jobs where people want to live correlated with higher factors of NIMBYism? Why doesn't everyone just want to move to Houston (which is losing population these days, even if the metro is gaining)?
What a strange question, as if it reverses the correlation. People who buy a property before new people come in, such as SF during the 60s, will inevitably see their home prices rise and want to capture that value without wanting to build more housing. The places where people don't want to live simply...don't see this phenomenon, because people don't want to live there. Of course supply and demand still matters, you can't just build houses in some random part of the country and expect people to move there. You need to build where people want to move. This doesn't really have to do anything with not building more housing, and indeed NIMBYism explicitly denies housing construction approvals.
> You need to build where people want to move. This doesn't really have to do anything with not building more housing, and indeed NIMBYism explicitly denies housing construction approvals.
Just because everyone wants to live in SF, which has a density much higher than Houston, doesn’t mean everyone can live in SF. If SF was a dense as Manhattan, it wouldn’t be any cheaper than it is now, it might even be as expensive as Manhattan.