7 ms·

I agree with the sentiment, but I think your facts are a bit off and reflect HN insularity. The median 33% household income ("middle class") in the US is $30,00

I agree with the sentiment, but I think your facts are a bit off and reflect HN insularity. The median 33% household income ("middle class") in the US is $30,000 to $62,500 (household). Even if you are the sole earner in your household, it is still unlikely that you make less than $62,500. If you do make less than that, ask for a raise. If you don't make less than that, or your combined household income is more than that, you are a member of the upper class, and you should try and remember your privilege. (Hey, life's not so bad.)

vonmoltke 13y ago
That is not how "class" is defined. Social class is based on socioeconomic power, influence, and security. Generally, the upper class is the top 1% or 2% of incomes or net worths, and the lower/working class is far larger than the lower 33%. Additionally, tying class tightly to income is nonsense, because it ignores people with significant wealth but little income and ignores the different socioeconomic climates across the US.
allochthon 13y ago
By any reasonable definition, being well-off means being able to take out a mortgage on a house, afford occasional vacations to other parts of the world, invest in the stock market, support a family, put your kids through college, give to different charities, save for retirement, all in addition to helping family members in need, which one would do under any circumstances. A software developer might be able to do these things in California, but only barely, unless they have a very cushy arrangement or they've ridden an exit for a startup. Those at the median household income in the US (or anywhere else) are being shafted. The economy is broken.
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  Hint: Don't live in California. There are plenty of well-paid software jobs in places like Boston, Chicago, Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Florida, Austin, etc. They might not have the glut of "hot" startups that Silicon Valley does, but they have much more reasonable cost of living.
  - Touche 13y ago
    What I was alluding to with my comment was that software developers create a tremendous amount of wealth while seeing little of it. That is as true outside SV as it is inside.
    - ForHackernews 13y ago
      True, and that's a fair point, but it's basically true of all employees anywhere in a capitalist economy. Even much-reviled Wall Street traders who receive million-dollar bonuses do so while bringing in many multiples of that in revenue for their firm.
      - djb_hackernews 13y ago
        However you don't see the politicians or those traders employers banging the drum to dilute the trader pool with foreign workers on extremely employer friendly worker visas.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > What I was alluding to with my comment was that software developers create a tremendous amount of wealth while seeing little of it. Elite workers are still workers. The people who receive most of the wealth created by workers are capitalists, not workers. There's a fairly strong ideology dedicated to preserving that state, with a name that makes that orientation quite clear.
      - Touche 13y ago
        We're not elite workers though, in terms of compensation.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      I'd encourage you to set up shop as an entrepreneur, consultant, or ISV. Then you will a.) get to keep all of the wealth you create (well, minus taxes - damn you Uncle Sam) and b.) get a true idea of how much wealth you actually create. Personally, I've done both the entrepreneur and employee route, and I created and kept a whole lot more money as an employee. I may go back to being an entrepreneur in the future - I'm certainly a lot more skilled than the last time I tried it - but the experience of founding my own startup and working 5 years in a big company has taught me a whole lot about the value that other job functions create, like sales, design, management, finance, capital, etc. It's really easy to look at your output as a software developer and say "I built the thing that makes my company hundreds of millions of dollars, and I only get to see hundreds of thousands of it", without realizing that none of that hundreds of millions in value would've been created without marketing to understand what people want, product design to understand how to supply it, UX to make it usable, sales to let people know about it, management to make all these functions work together, or finance to pay for it.
- oinksoft 13y ago
  > A software developer might be able to do these things in > California, but only barely, unless they have a very cushy > arrangement or they've ridden an exit for a startup. You can live in an affordable part of the state...there is a California outside of LA and the Bay.
  - hugs 13y ago
    I agree, and took it one step further. Even though I grew up in LA and am co-founder of an SF-based startup, I don't live there anymore. I choose to live in Chicago for a higher quality of life and lower cost of living. My attitude is thus: I'll move back to SF when I'm rich, but when I'm rich, I won't need to move back to SF.
- EpicEng 13y ago
  I live in San Diego. I don't make any more than your average programmer around here (very low six figures.) I can do all of those things, and in a nice area.
vehementi 13y ago
> The median 33% household income ("middle class") in the US is $30,000 to $62,500 (household). What does this even mean? Median 33%? Median is 50% How can it have a range? Are you saying the 33th percentile household income in the US ranges from 30k to 62.5k depending on the state?
- jaimebuelta 13y ago
  This means that the 33% of Americans that are "in the middle" (between the 33% with less income and the 33% with most) are in the range of 30K to 62K (Or so. I understand the data)
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    That is definitely what the GP thread meant, but the terminology was wrong. They wanted "percentile" median specifically refers to the 50th percentile. You could also use "tertile" (e.g. "The second tertile has income between 30k and 65k) which refers specifically to spliting into thirds.
  - logfromblammo 13y ago
    $30k is the 1st tercile. $62k is the 2nd tercile. They are also the 2nd and 4th sextiles, on either side of the median, which is the 3rd sextile, and approximately the same as the 33rd and 66th percentiles, or the 333rd and 666th permille. Income is not a normal distribution, so the two numbers don't tell much of a story by themselves. Usually, the statistics are shown as quintiles, plus median, 95th percentile, and maybe also 99th percentile and 999th permille, depending on whether the statistics presenter wants the audience to gasp or not.
afterburner 13y ago
The median household income is $55,000, with a median of 1.5 earners at that level. So, it seems to me quite likely an earner makes less than $62,000. Also, the median personal income is about $30,000, although this includes everyone older than 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
khuey 13y ago
Software engineers are concentrated in major metropolitan areas, often high cost ones (e.g. the SF bay area), so comparisons to the national median income are not necessarily accurate.
- walshemj 13y ago
  You would need to compare it to other professions lawyers/medical doctors and other types of engineers - and I woudl bet that the median for those working in the tech industry's is lower than MD's and lawyers
  - eLobato 13y ago
    So is the average level of education of people working in the tech industry and the barriers of entry.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      A Ceng/PE has the same requirements as a MD or lawyer arguably more so in the case of lawyers - but a Ceng or PE will earn less than a MD or lawyer for the same level of experience And dont you need a First from a good university to stand a good chance of high paying job in SV?
coolsunglasses 13y ago
This is highly location dependent and programmers are often located in expensive cities. 100k in the bay area is just middle class, no upper qualification. Very unlikely to afford a home within 25 minutes of work unless they're in the south bay. You need 200k total household income before a mortgage on a $1.3mm house (starter home cost in most neighborhoods) is realistic. There is a 10x difference in the cost of a home in SF and Austin (where I just moved to from SF) and a 20x difference between SF and where my father lives in Ohio. There is not a 20x difference in income between developers and the 30-60k US median. The medianites live out in the sticks where their mortgage is $150-600 a month.
- refurb 13y ago
  $1.3MM will get you a VERY nice home in some of the more exclusive neighborhoods in SF (Noe Valley). Only in SF do you have people complaining that they are "middle class" because they can't afford a single family home (already a luxury in major US cities) in a ritzy neighborhood and have to suffer through a >25 min commute. Houses in SF on the edge of the ritzy neighborhoods cost $700k. But that's not living the american dream right
  - coolsunglasses 13y ago
    $700k is still freakin' crazy.
crpatino 13y ago
Sorry, but splitting "classes" in thirds is just ridiculous. The way the economy works is by concentrating wealth, so any class definition based on clustering according to income/net-worth cannot be linear. A logarithmic scale would make much more sense, by example: Poor:= 0-50%, Middle class:= 51%-75%, Upper class:=76-100%??? This model is extremely rough and inaccurate, but is a step in the right direction. The main problem it has is to assume that there has to be only 3 classes, which is arbitrary and does not describe the actual lives of real people. A second, related defect is that it does not recognize the existence of a small group of very vulnerable people below the "working poor". For these reasons, I think it is best to model this clustering classification using a log-normal distribution, with at least five classes (Underclass < Working poor < Middle class < Upper-middle class < Upper class). Still, the "upper class" category lumps together the merely wealthy (smallish business owners, the most successful professionals) with the extremely rich, and all possibilities in-between.
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  > Still, the "upper class" category lumps together the merely wealthy (smallish business owners, the most successful professionals) with the extremely rich, and all possibilities in-between. It also lumps in the high-income earners with the high-net worth people (the ones everyone thinks of when they say "rich").
  - crpatino 13y ago
    agreed, you can only do so much when modeling a complex system with a single variable distribution.
aidenn0 13y ago
You arbitrarily picked the midle tertile. There is a much bigger difference in lifestyle between the 33rd and 67th percentile or the 90th percentile and the 99th percentile than there is between the 67th percentile and the 90th percentile. I would argue that wealth is a better measure of class than income anyway. There is an inflection point on the wealth curve, which (when you cross it) all you need to is not screw up really badly, and you will be wealthy for the rest of your life.
- arg01 13y ago
  Yep, at about 2 million dollars you could go to a small friendly town buy a house there and have an income close to the median (and have your assets track with inflation) assuming you can get a 5-6% return on investment, not at all unachievable on 'safe' long term investments. This is all without doing a single hour of work after hitting that point.
auctiontheory 13y ago
Despite the name, "middle class" does not mean "around median income." This is more apparent in countries like India and Brazil, but it's increasingly true in the US. "Upper class" definitely does not mean "top third by income." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class

vonmoltke 13y ago

That is not how "class" is defined. Social class is based on socioeconomic power, influence, and security. Generally, the upper class is the top 1% or 2% of incomes or net worths, and the lower/working class is far larger than the lower 33%. Additionally, tying class tightly to income is nonsense, because it ignores people with significant wealth but little income and ignores the different socioeconomic climates across the US.

allochthon 13y ago

By any reasonable definition, being well-off means being able to take out a mortgage on a house, afford occasional vacations to other parts of the world, invest in the stock market, support a family, put your kids through college, give to different charities, save for retirement, all in addition to helping family members in need, which one would do under any circumstances. A software developer might be able to do these things in California, but only barely, unless they have a very cushy arrangement or they've ridden an exit for a startup. Those at the median household income in the US (or anywhere else) are being shafted. The economy is broken.

ForHackernews 13y ago
Hint: Don't live in California. There are plenty of well-paid software jobs in places like Boston, Chicago, Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Florida, Austin, etc. They might not have the glut of "hot" startups that Silicon Valley does, but they have much more reasonable cost of living.
- Touche 13y ago
  What I was alluding to with my comment was that software developers create a tremendous amount of wealth while seeing little of it. That is as true outside SV as it is inside.
  - ForHackernews 13y ago
    True, and that's a fair point, but it's basically true of all employees anywhere in a capitalist economy. Even much-reviled Wall Street traders who receive million-dollar bonuses do so while bringing in many multiples of that in revenue for their firm.
    - djb_hackernews 13y ago
      However you don't see the politicians or those traders employers banging the drum to dilute the trader pool with foreign workers on extremely employer friendly worker visas.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > What I was alluding to with my comment was that software developers create a tremendous amount of wealth while seeing little of it. Elite workers are still workers. The people who receive most of the wealth created by workers are capitalists, not workers. There's a fairly strong ideology dedicated to preserving that state, with a name that makes that orientation quite clear.
    - Touche 13y ago
      We're not elite workers though, in terms of compensation.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    I'd encourage you to set up shop as an entrepreneur, consultant, or ISV. Then you will a.) get to keep all of the wealth you create (well, minus taxes - damn you Uncle Sam) and b.) get a true idea of how much wealth you actually create. Personally, I've done both the entrepreneur and employee route, and I created and kept a whole lot more money as an employee. I may go back to being an entrepreneur in the future - I'm certainly a lot more skilled than the last time I tried it - but the experience of founding my own startup and working 5 years in a big company has taught me a whole lot about the value that other job functions create, like sales, design, management, finance, capital, etc. It's really easy to look at your output as a software developer and say "I built the thing that makes my company hundreds of millions of dollars, and I only get to see hundreds of thousands of it", without realizing that none of that hundreds of millions in value would've been created without marketing to understand what people want, product design to understand how to supply it, UX to make it usable, sales to let people know about it, management to make all these functions work together, or finance to pay for it.
oinksoft 13y ago
> A software developer might be able to do these things in > California, but only barely, unless they have a very cushy > arrangement or they've ridden an exit for a startup. You can live in an affordable part of the state...there is a California outside of LA and the Bay.
- hugs 13y ago
  I agree, and took it one step further. Even though I grew up in LA and am co-founder of an SF-based startup, I don't live there anymore. I choose to live in Chicago for a higher quality of life and lower cost of living. My attitude is thus: I'll move back to SF when I'm rich, but when I'm rich, I won't need to move back to SF.
EpicEng 13y ago
I live in San Diego. I don't make any more than your average programmer around here (very low six figures.) I can do all of those things, and in a nice area.

vehementi 13y ago

> The median 33% household income ("middle class") in the US is $30,000 to $62,500 (household). What does this even mean? Median 33%? Median is 50% How can it have a range? Are you saying the 33th percentile household income in the US ranges from 30k to 62.5k depending on the state?

jaimebuelta 13y ago
This means that the 33% of Americans that are "in the middle" (between the 33% with less income and the 33% with most) are in the range of 30K to 62K (Or so. I understand the data)
- aidenn0 13y ago
  That is definitely what the GP thread meant, but the terminology was wrong. They wanted "percentile" median specifically refers to the 50th percentile. You could also use "tertile" (e.g. "The second tertile has income between 30k and 65k) which refers specifically to spliting into thirds.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  $30k is the 1st tercile. $62k is the 2nd tercile. They are also the 2nd and 4th sextiles, on either side of the median, which is the 3rd sextile, and approximately the same as the 33rd and 66th percentiles, or the 333rd and 666th permille. Income is not a normal distribution, so the two numbers don't tell much of a story by themselves. Usually, the statistics are shown as quintiles, plus median, 95th percentile, and maybe also 99th percentile and 999th permille, depending on whether the statistics presenter wants the audience to gasp or not.

afterburner 13y ago

The median household income is $55,000, with a median of 1.5 earners at that level. So, it seems to me quite likely an earner makes less than $62,000. Also, the median personal income is about $30,000, although this includes everyone older than 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

khuey 13y ago

Software engineers are concentrated in major metropolitan areas, often high cost ones (e.g. the SF bay area), so comparisons to the national median income are not necessarily accurate.

walshemj 13y ago
You would need to compare it to other professions lawyers/medical doctors and other types of engineers - and I woudl bet that the median for those working in the tech industry's is lower than MD's and lawyers
- eLobato 13y ago
  So is the average level of education of people working in the tech industry and the barriers of entry.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    A Ceng/PE has the same requirements as a MD or lawyer arguably more so in the case of lawyers - but a Ceng or PE will earn less than a MD or lawyer for the same level of experience And dont you need a First from a good university to stand a good chance of high paying job in SV?

coolsunglasses 13y ago

This is highly location dependent and programmers are often located in expensive cities. 100k in the bay area is just middle class, no upper qualification. Very unlikely to afford a home within 25 minutes of work unless they're in the south bay. You need 200k total household income before a mortgage on a $1.3mm house (starter home cost in most neighborhoods) is realistic. There is a 10x difference in the cost of a home in SF and Austin (where I just moved to from SF) and a 20x difference between SF and where my father lives in Ohio. There is not a 20x difference in income between developers and the 30-60k US median. The medianites live out in the sticks where their mortgage is $150-600 a month.

refurb 13y ago
$1.3MM will get you a VERY nice home in some of the more exclusive neighborhoods in SF (Noe Valley). Only in SF do you have people complaining that they are "middle class" because they can't afford a single family home (already a luxury in major US cities) in a ritzy neighborhood and have to suffer through a >25 min commute. Houses in SF on the edge of the ritzy neighborhoods cost $700k. But that's not living the american dream right
- coolsunglasses 13y ago
  $700k is still freakin' crazy.

crpatino 13y ago

Sorry, but splitting "classes" in thirds is just ridiculous. The way the economy works is by concentrating wealth, so any class definition based on clustering according to income/net-worth cannot be linear. A logarithmic scale would make much more sense, by example: Poor:= 0-50%, Middle class:= 51%-75%, Upper class:=76-100%??? This model is extremely rough and inaccurate, but is a step in the right direction. The main problem it has is to assume that there has to be only 3 classes, which is arbitrary and does not describe the actual lives of real people. A second, related defect is that it does not recognize the existence of a small group of very vulnerable people below the "working poor". For these reasons, I think it is best to model this clustering classification using a log-normal distribution, with at least five classes (Underclass < Working poor < Middle class < Upper-middle class < Upper class). Still, the "upper class" category lumps together the merely wealthy (smallish business owners, the most successful professionals) with the extremely rich, and all possibilities in-between.

ahomescu1 13y ago
> Still, the "upper class" category lumps together the merely wealthy (smallish business owners, the most successful professionals) with the extremely rich, and all possibilities in-between. It also lumps in the high-income earners with the high-net worth people (the ones everyone thinks of when they say "rich").
- crpatino 13y ago
  agreed, you can only do so much when modeling a complex system with a single variable distribution.

aidenn0 13y ago

You arbitrarily picked the midle tertile. There is a much bigger difference in lifestyle between the 33rd and 67th percentile or the 90th percentile and the 99th percentile than there is between the 67th percentile and the 90th percentile. I would argue that wealth is a better measure of class than income anyway. There is an inflection point on the wealth curve, which (when you cross it) all you need to is not screw up really badly, and you will be wealthy for the rest of your life.

arg01 13y ago
Yep, at about 2 million dollars you could go to a small friendly town buy a house there and have an income close to the median (and have your assets track with inflation) assuming you can get a 5-6% return on investment, not at all unachievable on 'safe' long term investments. This is all without doing a single hour of work after hitting that point.

auctiontheory 13y ago

Despite the name, "middle class" does not mean "around median income." This is more apparent in countries like India and Brazil, but it's increasingly true in the US. "Upper class" definitely does not mean "top third by income." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class