In the past year, Google announced both a 70 billion dollar stock buyback program and the layoff of 12,000 workers. This would not happen in an era where workers have a seat at the table, let alone an era where workers dominate the industry.
I think HN User Alephnerd's material point is that, to society, submitting to the tyranny of tech workers can feel just as bad as submitting to the tyranny of the capital élites. Probably a lot of non tech people in society would prefer submitting to the capital élites to submitting to the tech workers. I mean just from a numbers perspective, there are fewer of them. So if every person who has power becomes a douchebag sooner or later? Then, and I'm just thinking out loud here, but you probably want as few of them as possible.
Just trying to view things from the perspective of the, sort of, non tech, non "HN user" person out in flyover country.
100% this. And it's happening among my generation. There's a reason why words like "Tech Bro" are common parlance now.
Also, us techies have 100% become the capital elite now. We all work jobs that can afford us a full 401k contribution yearly plus the ability until a couple months ago to pull massive FHA loans at near 0% to buy a house.
New grad SWE positions are paying around 100-110k a year for around 20-30hrs/week of work, while new grad accounting, nursing, IB, govt work (GS-7), teaching, and other "middle class jobs" are pulling in 60-90k a year for 40-60 hours a week of work. There is an EXTREME amount of resentment against Techies for that reason. We all love to bitch and moan about our gilded cage, but at the end of the day, our lives are fucking amazing compared to the rest of Americans.
Being in the top 5% doesn't necessarily make you adjacent to the rest of society.
> New grad SWE positions are paying around 100-110k a year for around 20-30hrs/week of work
This was true 20 years ago during dot com boom, so not much has improved. Select FAANG workers over the past decade living in San Fran are making the big salaries, but the cost and quality of living is a huge tradeoff.
In SF, new grad SWE roles (non-FAANG) pay $130-140k base with TC reaching $200k with only 20-30 hours of work a week, which is massive compared to other white collar roles in SF (IB Analyst Base+TC comes to 150-160k w/ 90k base, starting level Biotech roles pay $80-90k, new grad accounting pays $90k, SF city employees earn $70-80k starting). Techies still trounce the rest of the city's earning power. I'm one of them.
Tech salaries trounced everyone else 20 years ago too. The $100k was not abnormal for grads in cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Raleigh-Durham 20 years ago when houses could be had $150k. Things aren’t that great these days in comparison.
Interesting. I didn't realize new grad salaries in the dot com boom broke 6 figures. I would have assumed $70-90k base with maybe a 10% bonus plus equity. Or is that $100k total comp, not base salary?
