Hacker News Reader

Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention, a comment like this in a discussion about a profession where single people regularly make multiples more than the average household.

I’m so tired of the crowd of software engineers (or any profession of similar income) that pretend to be middle class and share the struggle of the “common man”. Sure, the productivity goes to lining the pockets of the wealthy; and you are the wealthy.

View on HN

The average is still 100k. Acting like all engineers are somehow the rare FAANG hires who are making 250k+ is absurd. Further, you ignore the context in which "the wealthy" is used, which is describing those who profit directly from extracting value from labor of those who work beneath them. You know, the people who can offer someone 100k in salary because they know they'll make tenfold in profit back anyways.

And in some ways, the average SE is still in the same realm as someone making a third of what they do. Many are still just one particularly bad string of unfortunate events away from financial ruin, and it’s not even necessarily their fault with how high CoL is in many places now.

In terms of planes of existence, most SEs live on a layer much closer to those inhabited by the average person than they are to the layer that big tech C-suites and the like exist on.

When I first joined this website I was working as a programmer and barely above the poverty line. It took years for that to multiply, and my income and costs have both fluctuated heavily. I currently don’t struggle to make ends meet but I’ll never forget all the times when I did.

Some people here are paid a lot. But some are not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com