[AnthonyMouse]

> In an increasingly winner-take-all or at least winner-take-most economy, the best-educated and most-skilled employees cluster inside the most successful companies, their incomes rising dramatically compared with those of outsiders.

US median income is $52K, software developer is maybe 100K, so around double. But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living, and the various governments take more than a quarter of the difference in taxes and more than a quarter of the difference in disqualifications from income-based benefits programs. While you work 80 hours a week.

Someone making $100K in San Francisco is not doing better than someone making $50K in Houston. (You have a serious problem, however, if you make $50K in San Francisco.)

And the people clearing a million aren't typically silicon valley developers, they're Wall St quants and investment bankers. And those same people are generally paying the lower capital gains rate rather than the higher earned income rate, and losing a smaller percentage in benefits phase outs because by then everything is already phased out.

The numbers in the article are also including people who aren't working -- it has the 25th percentile income as zero and the median as something like $25K, which it probably is if you include retirees and homemakers and students, but how is that "income inequality"? For it to mean anything you have to be comparing people who are actually working full time. Anyone working obviously makes infinity times more than anyone with zero income.

As to the central thesis of "winner take most", markets like Facebook with network effects are the exception and have existed before (e.g. AT&T). In most other markets you can really blame regulatory compliance costs and regulatory capture. More paperwork to do and lawyers to hire and fees to pay to do business today than in 1970. The higher the cost of operating a business, the more advantage to consolidation.

[notacoward]

> But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living

No, you don't. Many choose to, but there are plenty of $100K developer jobs in cities with reasonable cost of living.

[AnthonyMouse]

There are plenty of $80K developer jobs in cities with a $20K lower cost of living.

If there were actually enough jobs in Texas and Tennessee for everyone in San Francisco to live there with lower expenses but the same salary, explain why most of those people don't do that. Note that things like "cost of finding a new job if you lose yours" are components of cost of living.

[notacoward]

Don't move the goalposts or shift the burden. You said have to. Now you say most and demand that others prove the contrary. Please stick to your original claim and prove it yourself. That's how honest discussion is done.

The real question here is not whether developers can get the exact same salary working somewhere other than SF/SV. For one thing, the story wasn't just about our industry. The original story posited three possible causes for between-firm inequality. Before we obsess over the winner-take-all factor and how it relates to being or not being in the Center Of The Universe (ha), we need to consider how those other two factors play out across the entire economy.

Even among tech companies, subject to the exact same cost-of-living issues, there are significant differences in pay scales. Believe me, I know, because I'm taking advantage of that right now as I transition between jobs. The richer companies are very successfully capturing a disproportionate share of the high-end labor market, either by direct hiring or by acquisition. That enables them to compound their original advantage, in a feedback loop that IMO must be attenuated unless we want to live in a true monoculture. The idea that developers must move to high-cost areas is crap, but the problem of developers going to work (often remotely) for the richest companies is very real.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You said have to.

It's a fact that they do. If they didn't have to then why would they leave the money on the table?

> Now you say most and demand that others prove the contrary.

It's most because if most of the developers in silicon valley moved to other places then the cost of living there would fall to parity with the other places as a result of decreased scarcity of housing and other resources, before all of them did. And because not everyone has the same utility function -- some people have to live there more than other people, e.g. because their spouse also works there and they can't find two equally-paying jobs in the same other city at the same time.

> Please stick to your original claim and prove it yourself. That's how honest discussion is done.

"People behave rationally" is a basic assumption. It isn't always true, but if you're going to contend that it isn't in a particular case then you're the one who needs to show that.

> The real question here is not whether developers can get the exact same salary working somewhere other than SF/SV. For one thing, the story wasn't just about our industry.

You're changing the subject. The story, and the protests, refer to "highly paid" tech workers at SV companies like Google and Apple. But it remains true that those people are not significantly wealthier on a PPP basis than people making median US wages but living in a city with a lower cost of living.

> Even among tech companies, subject to the exact same cost-of-living issues, there are significant differences in pay scales.

Better developers obviously get paid more than worse developers. But the same is true in Texas. They both get paid less and pay less for housing but the better developer still makes more than the worse developer. And that isn't new either -- "better talent costs more" is as old as money.

> That enables them to compound their original advantage, in a feedback loop that IMO must be attenuated unless we want to live in a true monoculture.

There are two kinds of markets. One is natural monopolies, like local roads or last mile telecommunications, where the fixed cost is the essentially whole cost, barriers to entry are high, monopoly is inevitable, and they should be operated by the local government. The other is "real" markets that, left alone, would have competition.

We keep screwing up the second ones and forcing them into monopolies anyway, by making it harder for small entities to compete. The situation with software patents is a prime example.

Having money to pay talent is an advantage, but it isn't an insurmountable advantage. The only way to use it to stay on top is to be efficient. Serve every possible niche so well that nobody else can come in and carve one out for themselves. And if a company is doing that, nobody objects.

The problem isn't that, it's that we've set things up so that little companies have prohibitively high costs, so a startup that should be five people in a garage using money borrowed from parents instead has to take a million dollars in VC funding to hire lawyers and file paperwork. And then, if they succeed, megacorp shows up with a buyout against the threat of a lawsuit if you refuse to take the money to make the competition go away, which is what the VCs wanted all along anyway, so everybody gets paid but nobody competes.

The problem isn't that they have too much money, it's that they have too much leverage. If was only the money and regulatory barriers to entry were lower then there would be too many startups to buy them all and more of them would become independent competitors.

[notacoward]

> But it remains true that those people are not significantly wealthier on a PPP basis than people making median US wages but living in a city with a lower cost of living.

No, it remains your unfounded - and untrue - assertion. A lot of people have salaries very close to those in Silicon Valley, in housing markets significantly cheaper than Silicon Valley. Haven't you heard of remote work? A lot of us at the high end are able to do it, but maybe you haven't reached that point yourself. For people like me and quite a few of my friends/colleagues, we're winning the PPP game by not living in SV.

> Better developers obviously get paid more than worse developers.

Now who's changing the subject? We're not talking about better or worse developers. We're talking about developers at the same level, often the same people as they move from job to job. Rich companies can and do pay higher salaries regardless of the worker's location. That creates a feedback loop, distorting both labor and capital markets, turning temporary advantages into permanent ones and stifling competition.

I've worked at a lot of startups, and learned a lot about their advantages and disadvantages relative to larger competitors. Over-regulation was never one of those problems, and nobody responsible for setting strategy was ever so ideologically blind that they tried to pretend otherwise. I'm guessing that's not a recipe for startup success, in Silicon Valley or anywhere else.

[AnthonyMouse]

> No, it remains your unfounded - and untrue - assertion.

Which part do you assert is untrue, that there are developers actually living in SV, or that making more money there is equivalent to making less money somewhere with a lower cost of living?

> A lot of people have salaries very close to those in Silicon Valley, in housing markets significantly cheaper than Silicon Valley. Haven't you heard of remote work?

Everybody wants remote work at SV salaries. That doesn't mean everybody can get it.

It's obviously true tautologically that people who don't live in SV don't have to live there, but those are also not the people bidding up area rents or riding a shuttle with people protesting outside it.

You still haven't offered any explanation for why the people living in SV continue to do so if it was actually possible for them to do the same thing you're doing.

> We're not talking about better or worse developers. We're talking about developers at the same level, often the same people as they move from job to job.

We are talking about better or worse developers, or what is your argument? When one person goes from making less money to more money, all it shows is that they were previously under-compensated (or are now over-compensated) for their skill level. Or that their skill level has changed. If big companies were paying higher salaries to the same developers then how would that create any advantage for them?

> Rich companies can and do pay higher salaries regardless of the worker's location. That creates a feedback loop, distorting both labor and capital markets, turning temporary advantages into permanent ones and stifling competition.

Rich tech companies don't have a monopoly on capital. If all it took is to pay developers a lot of money then it would be Wall St rather than tech companies doing the paying and collecting the yields.

> I've worked at a lot of startups, and learned a lot about their advantages and disadvantages relative to larger competitors. Over-regulation was never one of those problems, and nobody responsible for setting strategy was ever so ideologically blind that they tried to pretend otherwise.

Over-regulation isn't a problem for the startups that actually exist -- VCs don't fund the ones the regulations make prohibitive and provide the money to pay the cost for the others. But the result is fewer startups, so rich companies can afford to buy every one of them that poses a threat to them.

Let me give an example of bad regulation. DMCA 1201 (or software patents, or the CFAA, or whatever they use this year), which Apple et al use to lock smaller entities out of their platforms unless they pay 30% and just outright prohibit people from making apps they don't like. Are you taking the position that that sort of a veto doesn't prevent startups that would otherwise compete with Apple's apps from getting off the ground?