What’s the hacker news angle on this article? I was happy to discuss it on other sites this morning, but it seems like a purely political article without any unique appeal to Hackers.
Because travel over boarders unmolested and ability to transport data are important both philosophically and practicality. Much of the appeal of the internet is the casual reach - these actions are the exact opposite.
In addition to concerns about human rights which are succinctly described as "everyone's problem" and not to be dismissed because of whose team would look bad.
I believe most of the major (and some of the minor) newspapers offer a SecureDrop instance to transfer confidential information.
So I would send the entirety of the information to every newsroom that could receive it, then pray that I: A) was not the only initial recipient of the Epstein drop and B) that the information I received doesn't contain any content that could be uniquely identified to me.
Afterwards I would sit down and have a long think about how my life got to the point where Epstein is communicating with me personally.
It's not clear to me that free software is any more essential to a free society than libraries are. Which is to say, it's a clear public good but that's not a compelling reason to position it as a requirement for a free society. I would very much appreciate if you could expand on why it is childish to believe otherwise.
Look, there's free software that I absolutely love like Vim, but unless things have drastically changed in the past 12 months many open source "alternatives" trail their paid alternatives in features and ease of use. I would choose open source applications if they could demonstrate a superior experience, but I'm unwilling to jump over hurdles for promises of quality that have yet to materialize.
For instance, I agree that Adobe's model is just awful, but Procreate is miles ahead of Gimp so I'd rather give those devs thirty bucks as a one time fee over using free software that is less enjoyable or expedient for my work. That's the crux of it really: for most people computing is a means to an end so it makes sense that users optimize their choices around results rather than ideals about the future of computing.
Also, what you've described doesn't sound like a better economy at all from where I'm sitting. I love not being a sole proprietor or part of a small dev shop. It's great being able to go home on a Friday and know that if anything comes up over the weekend that someone else will handle it. It's equally great knowing that I have the resources of a large company and the combined expertise of a massive pool of employees. I would certainly be less happy as a consultant, independent developer, or entrepreneur.
I’m not the grandparent commenter, but my total compensation this year is roughly the same, so I thought I’d chime in with my savings:
$28.6k - 401k contributions & match
$112k - RSUs after tax
$14k - Monthly emergency fund contributions from paycheck (yearly total)
~$16k - Bonus after tax
My expenses really haven’t increased in line with the compensation. The picture would look different if I had a family, but I’m in my late 20s. I suppose I could eat high quality sushi daily, but I’ll settle for weekly.
You'd also have to go by a pseudonym or a perspective partner might google you and ruin the whole charade. At that point your behavior is fairly duplicitous, which is hardly a solid foundation for one of the most meaningful relationships of your life.
We don't have any indication that the OP took any form of flight to get to the coral. There is not enough detail within that post to shame them for their carbon footprint, and such ire would be better directed at the ~100 companies that are responsible for 70% of emissions.
Agree with the first part of the above comment, but I wonder about the statistic in the second half.
I have seen it before and I always wonder when it comes up: If you take a flight with Emirates, is it considered pollution by Emirates or by you? What about the CO2 used to build the plane? Should you divide those emissions among everyone that flew in the plane, or should that CO2 be added to the company?
These salaries don't come from thin air, they're constrained by the market rate at which engineers can be hired and retained. It's unfairly reductive to say that the engineers aren't contributing value since they work in ads. We work in all sorts of fields from the frivolous, like consumer electronics, to the decidedly less so like self-driving.
If the discrepancy between engineering salaries and research/teaching/nursing salaries is bothersome then perhaps the blame should be placed on the economic environment that has produced this result, not the twenty-somethings that are accepting great compensation.
It doesn't appear to me that the parent implied that these salaries come from thin air. It seems much more obvious that this person is pointing out just how disproportionate it is compared to other very crucial professions, with no obvious labor differences for why this is.
Chalking it up to it being the "market rate" sort of ignores how the market has failed for these other professions. They have to deal with the cost of living just like people in tech. The issue with the new grads, as the parent pointed out, is the attitude. Most could care less about this. That deserves critique.
I should also add that this dynamic does play out in other parts of the country. In other states in the US with much lower costs of living, nurses and teachers for example still have an average salary that is much lower than that of those in the tech industry, especially software development.
> with no obvious labor differences for why this is
One difference that stands out to me is that the supply of people who can perform the job is constrained.
Other professions may be crucial - indeed, the truck drivers who deliver supplies to all stores from which we purchase daily goods are crucial - but that job in particular can be performed by almost anyone with minimal training.
Words like "crucial" don't have much meaning as far as determining job compensation: it's a supply/demand interaction. If the supply of people who can perform the job is not constrained, because the job is relatively easy to get into, then that will suppress the compensation.
It's difficult to obtain a computer science degree and perform at the level required to solicit job offers from the kind of companies that pay new graduates $200k. Imagine for the sake of argument that these jobs require an IQ of 125 or higher: then only about 5% of the population will be capable of performing at that level. (This is just an example. I'm not saying that I think programming has a particular IQ requirement.)
This is also reductive. If market value was the sole driver for selection of profession, we would suffer a critical lack of specialists in a variety of fields.
tbf, I think far more people can do jobs where they talk to people and teach (teachers) and take care of people and nurture (nurses), than jobs where you look at a screen all day, do abstract symbol manipulation and spend most of your focus inside your head building structures of code and programs.
I showed my relatives how you 'follow the line of execution' in a program running down all the instructions. They sat back in shock, thinking how alien that job would be and how so few people are probably able to do that, and that i should be lucky (?) to have the skills to think that way.
As someone who has done both professionally, I think you're severely underestimating how hard teaching is. I think it's much harder to teach well than to code well.
Don't forget, too, that good teachers are experts in the subjects they teach. Teaching computer science or math well requires the same facility with "abstract symbol manipulation" that working as a software engineer does.
But it isn't really required that teachers teach well. If I were to try and give an honest assessment of the teachers (specifically primary school both public and private) I've had I would say maybe 5% were good teachers, 5% were genuinely bad and the rest just kind of coasted by having students do rote memorization.
I didn’t mean to single out teachers specifically — as parent was using them as example — but I meant that in general , professions where you have more human interaction is more desired by the majority of the human population .
If you have done both professionally, then by definition, you can code. I think your parent poster's point is that too few people can. They are not saying that teaching is easy.
It's almost as if it didn't matter how crucial the work you do is, and instead what you make is determined by how much leverage you have and perhaps in part by how close to the money you are.
Thank you for elegantly saying what I was trying to say. You were able to put a much finer perspective on it that appears to be more digestable than my comment.
22 and 23 year olds making $200k+ a year? For doing what, exactly? Contributing 0.001% of the codebase to an app that sells advertisements?
It may not have been your intent, but your comment has (at least on my read) an accusatory tone. You ask a number of rhetorical questions which indicate that you have low-regard for the work of the engineers in question.
You appear to be doubling down on this with your recent comment.
Why so defensive
Calling someone defensive because they disagree with you is uncivil and a great way to start an argument. In the most literal sense of the word, my comment offers some justification for these salaries because yours appears to discredit them.
>It may not have been your intent, but your comment has (at least on my read) an accusatory tone. You ask a number of rhetorical questions which indicate that you have low-regard for the work of the engineers in question.
I do have low regard for the engineers in question (low regard in terms of their ability and worthiness of salary, obviously not low regard in terms of their person). The majority of engineers in SV are working on products that primarily exist to serve advertisements to customers. They don't deserve $200k+ for that, and it makes me sad that society has decided these are the people that are paid this much while teachers and nurses are actually starving.
You say that self-driving car engineers deserve it? Really? Show me the 22 year olds that have contributed meaningfully to self-driving technology. But you can't. Because the people making the meaningful contributions (read: worthy of being paid $200k+) are much more experienced, have been working in the field much longer, and are much older. They are not 22 year old new grads.
>Calling someone defensive because they disagree with you is uncivil and a great way to start an argument. In the most literal sense of the word, my comment offers some justification for these salaries because yours appears to discredit them.
And claiming that someone is accusing blame (when they haven't) is also uncivil and a great way to start an argument.
Just curious, did you have the same feeling towards the many decades when law and finance new grads were making $200K-300K (and many still do)? Is writing reports about financial statements of a company or proofreading legal text a more worthy endeavor than making apps/websites that attract users? Are those new grads making meaningful contributions to society?
>Just curious, did you have the same feeling towards the many decades when law and finance new grads were making $200K-300K (and many still do)?
Yes. The difference (aside from the fact that this particular post is specifically about SV, not about law and finance) is that I have never seen lawyers, doctors, or even investment bankers (although yes I have seen Wolf of Wall Street) be so casual about the fact that their salaries are so high. In another comment in this thread, someone suggested that having an extra $5,000 disposable per month was not a lot of money. That is absurd to me, and I have never experienced any of my doctor or lawyer friends have that same attitude.
Do you think having extra $50 disposable per month is a lot of money? There was a time when it would be hugely important for me, and now it is not.
What "lot of money" means is entirely relative to how much money you have because for most people it means "would it translate to large difference in lifestyle".
Also, if we are talking about the comment by refurb, it said "rolling in cash" which does not carry the same connotations as "lot of money".
>What "lot of money" means is entirely relative to how much money you have because for most people it means "would it translate to large difference in lifestyle".
Yes, and my entire point (or at least, the one started by the original top level comment) is that SV has strayed really far from the typical level of "relative" that most of the rest of the country operates on.
thank you for responding so elegantly in a 7+ depth argument to multiple posters each with their own critiques. This is what i read HN for. The parent node comment having to provide a rebuttal for every child lol
I saw somewhere else in the thread that you yourself are a new grad, so I'll chalk this up to lack of experience but on sufficiently large products it is trivial to make incremental changes that will produce more value then your salary. In my own career I saved a big tech company 250k in reoccurring costs with a 9 month project I completed as a junior. Yes, that number is a rounding error for a large company but the value is clear.
Additionally, perhaps you have never built a team before, but the value of a potential employee extends beyond their year-to-year output. If, for example, I have great confidence that a currently junior hire will output ~$1M of value over a four year period than I am willing to overpay that first year as they grow and develop.
This isn't going anywhere interesting and I am uninterested in continuing the conversation further. Have a nice day :)
(There is a certain irony to me about this back and forth. A large portion of my personal time is spent volunteering in an organization that agitates for unions and other forms of direct action aimed at tackling the gross inequity of this society head-on. You're clearly keyed in to a real and present problem, but rather than suggest any solutions you've decided to whinge ineffectively about... developer salaries?)
edit: and for the record, I'm one of those "new grads" making a self-admittedly absurd amount of money for what honestly amounts to a relatively meaningless contribution to society. Yea, I take the salary (and try to donate a good bit of it), but it still makes me feel uneasy that I'm being paid this much in the first place.
I'm sorry, how was I supposed to read that? If someone tells you that they lack experience, it is entirely within the pale to comment on or draw conclusions from their lack of experience.
And no, I do not want to measure your genitalia. That doesn't have any place on Hacker News.
I;m going to interpret your comment nicely and assume you read my comment before the edit, but I was a new grad. I made that edit (the one you quoted) to emphasize the fact that I am familiar with the high salaries and personally receive one. However, it would have been more accurate to say that I was a new grad years ago, but am not anymore.
Regardless, even if I was a new grad, it would not have been justification for your reductive and dismissiveness. That is not good faith discussion.
>And no, I do not want to measure your genitalia. That doesn't have any place on Hacker News.
Do you really need a citation for the common knowledge fact that teachers are one of the most low paid professions in America? Do you not know that many of them have to take up second jobs in order to pay their bills? You can read about that here, or by doing a Google search:
Did you miss the entire #ClearTheList campaign last month for when teachers started up school again? If so, the tl;dr is that teachers were having to ask their friends and family to buy school supplies for their classrooms because the teachers could not afford to do so themselves.
Amazon, ironically, created an entire section of their site for such lists. Does it not seem even a little bit of a problem to you that Amazon, one of the richest companies in the world, with some of the richest employees in the world, rather than using some of that wealth to help the teachers, actually created a service where Amazon actually profited off of the fact that these teachers needed assistance buying school supplies?
None of those links support your claim that teachers and nurses are starving. Having a relatively low income (according to polls!) does not mean you are dying on the streets due to malnutrition. Taking a second job does not mean the alternative is peril. I could take a second job to afford a better Ferrari but that does not mean I can't afford a car. Try again.
The third link literally has 'starving' in the title, referring to the schools and teachers that work there. It is common parlance to use the term 'starving' to refer to more than just 'dying on the streets due to malnutrition'. You know this, but you chose to nitpick the word instead of interpreting my comment the way you knew I meant it. Please do not do that, it is against the HN guidelines.
>Taking a second job does not mean the alternative is peril. I could take a second job to afford a better Ferrari but that does not mean I can't afford a car. Try again.
We aren't talking about teachers taking a second job so that they can afford niceties or a new car. We're talking about teachers taking a second job just so they can afford rent. Many of them are on federal subsidy programs just so they can afford food.
What was that you said about it being VERY important that we agree on the usage of words? Apparently “blame” only has one definition but it’s okay to say a person is actually starving (your exact words) and really mean that their organization is short on resources. I’m glad you searched “teachers starving” and copy and pasted the first 4 links you saw that had the words in the headline but they don’t support your argument. In fact, no one here has supported your argument because it is nothing more than virtue signaling coming from the very person you hate.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that, and I don't want to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future—no matter how wrong or annoying another commenter is or you feel they are.
"Place blame" has one definition. It is not used in the manner in which you earlier tried to accuse me of "placing blame". "Starve" on the other hand, is used in multiple ways, one of those actual definitions is to be deprived of resources. It does not always mean "dying of malnutrition".
I showed you multiple links that show evidence of teachers being deprived of resources, aka starving. If you can't accept that, then you are not arguing in good faith and I'm through trying to have a discussion with you. Please try to abide by HN guidelines in further discussions.
Please don't do flamewars like this on HN. When people descend to arguing about what they said or didn't say, or how unfairly other commenters are treating them, the discussion stopped being interesting a long time ago.
Are you sure? Because it sure sounds like you disagree that these people deserve to be making large sums of money and then also not be appreciative of it. I would call that placing blame.
> Saying that these grads don't deserve that much money
Of course they deserve it - the money belongs to their employer and they decided to part with it in exchange for the services of those grads.
Whatever it is that you're trying to say hinges entirely on what you think the concept of "to deserve something" means. And you really haven't elaborated much on that (if at all, as far as I can see).
When I say "deserve" I mean it in a broader sense that considers more aspects of our society than just "a company is willing to pay that much".
Sure, Facebook is probably willing to pay a mediocre engineer much more than they are willing to pay the best teacher in the world. That makes sense, because Facebook doesn't hire teachers and has no reason to pay a teacher a lot of money. In this sense, the teacher doesn't "deserve" a lot of money from Facebook, while the engineer might.
But speaking in a broader sense, do you think that a mediocre 22 year old engineer "deserves" more money and a better lifestyle than the best teacher in the world?
> But speaking in a broader sense, do you think that a mediocre 22 year old engineer "deserves" more money and a better lifestyle than the best teacher in the world?
Well, first of all, it is very unlikely that the "best teacher in the world" simply works in school. And if they do - then it is by choice.
Second, it would of course not matter if said mediocre engineer is 22 or 66 years old - maybe you just included it for the sake of illustration but it does give some ageism vibes.
Anyway, since you have still not elaborated on what "to deserve" means to you, I will tell you how I think about it. When I think "someone doesn't deserve something" it implies "this should not be so". Now we have a question - can we and should we do something about it? Either on a personal level, or on collective governmental level.
In this particular case - it would depend on having a way to objectively determine teacher's skill level and whether disproportionately high skill level would translate to similarly disproportional effects in their teaching (both in the individual pupil results and the number of pupils they are able to reach). All of that is required because they are paid by public money - private tutors can get paid whatever their clients are willing to pay.
If we are able to do that, I might say such a great teacher deserves to be paid lot of money, comparable to what Facebook pays it's engineers. Otherwise, I would not presume to say that any particular teacher should (which is the same as "deserves" for me) command a salary based on what few big tech companies are willing to pay fresh grads.
>In this particular case - it would depend on having a way to objectively determine teacher's skill level
This might be putting the cart before the horse. You may not find very "high skill level" teachers, but that's not a justifiable reason to not pay them. The way to get high skill level teachers is likely to attract people with high skill with a higher pay.
How do we make pay for teachers higher? I don't know exactly, and I don't want to start a political debate, but one idea might be to collect taxes from the giant FAANG companies and use those taxes to pay teachers more, rather than just letting the FAANGs frivolously throw the money around. I think that would be a better use of the money rather than letting billions (or in the case of a commenter here, $11k/month) sit in a bank account doing nothing.
>When I think "someone doesn't deserve something" it implies "this should not be so"
This is what I'm saying, too, but I think I'm applying it differently. I'm not looking narrowly at a CS grad's salary and saying "this should not be so". I'm looking at CS grad salaries in relation to salaries of other crucial-to-society professions like teachers, and saying that the disparity "should not be so".
You have already started a political debate with your first comment, whether you wanted to or not.
But I just want to notice that you seem very willing to command other people's money based on the most casual of observations and lot of emotion. That will not lead to a good place, policy wise.
Wait, what? Pointing out that CS grads make more money than teacher is political?
This reminds me of a HN post a few weeks ago about how SFers have the tendency to take a discussion about anything and see it as political.
>But I just want to notice that you seem very willing to command other people's money
At no point other than the comment that was written in response to your question asking how I would allocate money have I suggested "commanding" anyone else's money. It's very disingenuous of you to ask me a question, and then use the fact that I responded to that question as means to bash me.
> 22 and 23 year olds making $200k+ a year? For doing what, exactly?
> Meanwhile teachers, researchers, nurses etc (of which many also live in SF, by the way) are making pennies and some literally starving to survive.
That is political. It's not an insult, it's just that it's literally about the policies of how we pay teachers, nurses and researchers and how we constrain (or not) large tech salaries.
And I'm not from SF, not even from US.
> At no point other than the comment that was written in response to your question asking how I would allocate money have I suggested "commanding" anyone else's money. It's very disingenuous of you to ask me a question, and then use the fact that I responded to that question as means to bash me.
I never asked you how you would allocate money, I just asked what you mean by "deserve". And BTW, this: "collect taxes from the giant FAANG companies and use those taxes to pay teachers more, rather than just letting the FAANGs frivolously throw the money around" is commanding other peoples money.
Also, I don't believe I bashed you, but there would be nothing disingenuous in asking you a question and then bashing you based on the answer. It would just not be nice or appropriate for HN.
It isn't political. Nothing in my comment at all talks about the policies of how we pay anyone. If you read my words and then your mind took the leap to thinking about those policies, then you apparently have a tendency to politicize things, but that doesn't make my comment political.
Regardless, your original statement was that it "started a political debate", and I'll concede that it did apparently do that.
>I never asked you how you would allocate money, I just asked what you mean by "deserve".
You asked what we could "do about it", referencing teacher pay and allocation of funds for that pay.
>Also, I don't believe I bashed you, but there would be nothing disingenuous in asking you a question and then bashing you based on the answer. It would just not be nice or appropriate for HN.
You didn't bash me based on the answer, you bashed me for even accepting the premise of the question, a question that you asked.
Okay, let's agree to disagree on the terminology. What exact solution do you propose? Do people stop accepting this money? Do they thank their cashiers extra generously because they make 10x more? What is the actionable step here that would make it all okay in your eyes?
>Okay, let's agree to disagree on the terminology.
No, let's not. If we're going to have a discussion, we're at least going to agree on the actual meaning of words, otherwise attempting to discuss them is going to be fruitless.
To blame means to assign responsibility for a fault or wrong. At no point in my comment above did I assign responsibility to anyone for any fault or wrong. In this case, the "fault or wrong" would be being paid too high. Again, nowhere in my comment did I say, or even imply that the new grads are responsible for their high pay. That fault would (obviously) lie with the people willing to give them such high pay.
Based on this, you can now see why the rest of your comment doesn't make sense. The new grads aren't responsible for doing anything (they don't have to not accept the money or whatever) because it isn't their fault in the first place.
From the fact that you took a dump on the steps of this thread and have repeatedly refused to back up or explain your points both to me and others who responded to you by arguing over semantics and side stepping questions, I'm just going to assume you are acting in bad faith.
I know that saying "now you're just arguing semantics" is a smug way to get out of having to participate in an actual discussion, but it's silly to do that here. You brought up the claim of blame, and now you're backpedaling when it's revealed that you used the word incorrectly. It's not arguing semantics when your entire point rests on the meaning of the word.
If you aren't willing to abide by the actual meaning of words when you attempt to use them, you're the bad faith actor, and a discussion is going to get us nowhere.
Use that money to fund education, healthcare, public parks, infrastructure, basic research, etc, including by paying the people doing that work a bit more.
I love this question. The information density and longevity of old forums is hard to replicate on Reddit, Discord, or Facebook groups.
I’ve been spending a lot of time over at https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/index.php recently. It’s THE forum for modular synthesis in all forms and for me it really scratches the hacker/musician/tinkerer itch.
This isn't representative of my personal experience nor my peer/friend groups' in tech. Anecdata: of the ~5 senior engineer friends I have at large tech companies only one of them consistently works much more than 35 hours a week.
I was actually really heartened to see this article on HN because slow mornings have been life changing for me. Spending 3 quiet hours in the morning on my own pursuits has been wildly mood elevating. Plus, I usually use one of those hours to read about tech (although HN is banned from my morning hours). Five hours of study a week is easily ~240 hours of spaced repetition even if you miss a few weeks, and I would bet good money that it's more studying than the vast majority of my coworkers.
