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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

GP's point is that the extra money has little value, because your spending options are becoming bimodal in distribution: all the trinkets are priced at "approximately anyone with a job can afford some of it", while the important bits like housing are priced at "an order of magnitude more than people typically earn", and this gap just cannot be crossed by working hard to get salary raises.

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Let's consider some actual numbers, though: In 1999 I got my first "corporate" job at a starting salary of $50K. I was paying $800 a month for a two bedroom apartment, and what was left over was enough to comfortably support me and my wife. Entry level salary for the same job is now about $120K, meaning someone in that position can easily afford to pay $1920 a month for rent. According to Zillow, that same apartment is now renting for $2305 a month.

So what we're hand-wringing about is a ~$385 increase in rent, which comes to about 4% more of the person's gross salary than 25 years ago. That sucks a little bit, but it's not a catastrophe.

And on top of that, you can still make a ton of side money through bonuses and stock, in the industry that I assume we're mostly talking about. A few months ago I gave a $90K stock grant to a guy. Even if the stock price stagnates, that on its own is almost half his housing costs for the next five years, and it's all because he works harder than the guy in the next cube over.

That pay is significantly above the US average of $77,463[0].

For a different anecdote, an friend of mine briefly worked a pizza fast-food joint in Davis (CA), and the pay from that didn't even cover her rent and bills, she had to get support from others.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...

You used a single personal data point and then pulled numbers completely out of nowhere and are comfortable making general statements about housing affordability on that basis? Bold.

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