Item — HN Reader

This era is absolutely dominated by the tech worker class.

The people my age who became tech workers (like me) would have become IBs in the 2000s, lawyers in the 90s, or relationship bankers in the 80s.

Look at how many people my age with money completely gentrified NoMA in DC, Park Slopes in Brooklyn, large tracts of Mission in SF, priced out Gays from the Leather District in SF, CapHill in Seattle, made Austin uncool, etc.

2 comments

Somehow I don’t think the people who learned to code wanting to make games or fix problems, or because they just love it, would have become o vestment bankers. There’s certainly a group who went for the money but there’s also a large number of make the money doing something they love.

Your gentrification comment is irrelevant

It is not when it shows how people in Tech have a level of undue capital influence in America in the 2020s. This isn't the 1980s-1990s anymore (which was 30-40 years ago at this point) when nerds would be bullied for playing D&D or put in lockers.

Society has changed, and software engineering is viewed as the goto high paying job for people in my age demographic. And to be honest it makes sense - you make six figures, almost never go into the office, have the ability to travel all over the world working remotely, low working hours, intellectually stimulating work, etc.

And it's my cohort that plays a role in buying property and making everything expensive.

The archetype of programmer you mention still exists (hell, I don't program for a living anymore but I still mess around with kernel programming and OS dev) but are very much the minority now. Majoring in CS and CE is a fast track way to become a member of the 10% in American society so EVERYONE is trying to major in it.

I find solace in the fact that most of these people will not "succeed"(by that I mean becoming respectable, competent engineers who will have good opportunities readily available to them). CS is hard; quite a large chunk of these sorts of people who enroll in bootcamps or try to major in CS end up dropping out or not pursuing a CS related job. Who knew that being genuinely interested in a subject helps in becoming good at it too.

Ehn maybe. I know some legitimately brilliant engineers who absolutely fucking hate code and once they grind up to staff, will nope to Engineering Management or Product Management.

I liked code but at some point, I got pissed off at ego driven "10x" engineers who couldn't be bother to explain in a non-combative manner how they architected their code base even though I was directly impacted by it. I realized weilding the mallet of "Profit and Loss responsibility" could get the assholes to shut up and let the rest of the engineers get unblocked.

Yeah I see your point, but is that a product of an unideal work environment or a lack of passion? Mabye even both to be honest.

> Society has changed, and software engineering is viewed as the goto high paying job for people in my age demographic.

This explains the influx of grifters and “MBA” types into the software industry along with the focus of software onto marketing junk, psychological manipulation, invasive ai, scammy digital coins, and scraping up people’s private data.

As someone who got into coding for the fun of it as a nerdy kid in the 90’s – now that the money is there, I’m not gonna not follow it. If I can have fun for 50k or for 200k+, I’ll take the 200k option thanks.

I think his comment applies more towards the PM/BizOps type people.

A lot of them are actually ex-Bankers too

It's SWEs as well. Leetcode grinding isn't hard if you have an Applied Math background, like a large portion of IBankers. Ironically, I don't meet many ex-IBs as a PM.

Edit with additional anecdote:

A friend of mine who works IB told me how most of SF's Goldman Sachs Analysts (new grad IBs) class in 2020 and 2021 left for tech (either PM or SWE) because you earn more as a new grad FAANG dev than as an IB Analyst ($90k base and variable bonus that ended up pushing TC to around $150-160k with 60-70 hours of work).

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?