[grapeskin]

Tech workers can skip FAANG’s 300k salaries and still do fine with 180k at a more ethical company. Those people are responsible.

The people slaving for 50 cents over minimum wage and still being unable to pay rent don’t have much of a choice.

[chii]

> skip FAANG’s 300k salaries and still do fine with 180k at a more ethical company. Those people are responsible.

they are ethical, or altruistic, but certainly can't claim they are financially responsible.

If they don't have dependents (now or in the future), then they can remain financially irresponsible, because it will have little effect. But if they plan on having dependents such as children, they will need the funds to compete for scarce resources such as housing and school etc. They will also need to provide for their own retirement.

If they choose to take a lower paying job (when a higher paying one is definitely available), they are making a sacrifice on behalf of their dependents, who may or may not appreciate this choice being made for them.

[knowledge-clay]

> they are ethical, or altruistic, but certainly can't claim they are financially responsible.

I would hardly describe taking a salary that puts you in the top 5% of earners instead of the top 2% to be financially irresponsible.

[rsanek]

That percentile can vary pretty significantly based on where you live.

[bfung]

> they are ethical, or altruistic, but certainly can't claim they are financially responsible.

The definition of financial responsibility should be clarified.

I’d argue that making as much money as possible while ignoring morals or ethics is not “financially responsible”, it actually fits into the definition of psychopathic behavior (https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/sociopath-psych...).

As another sibling comment mentions, making 180k vs 300k as an individual doesn’t lowers one’s quality of life that much; there’s still enough disposable income to take trips, save for retirement, etc.

The “I don’t worry about my next meal” threshold for a warehouse hourly worker ($18/hr * 40hr/week * 52weeks/year ~= $37.5k) can be drastically improved.

[ohgodplsno]

>certainly can't claim they are financially responsible.

My man, with 180k you can comfortably afford a house by the time you're 30, have a quick million aside _and_ do lines a cocaine off a hooker's ass every week. 180k is a salary way past the bar of "fiscal responsibility".

[grapeskin]

Taking a job that screws over workers below you is really just sticking a middle finger up to the world around you.

A typical programming job is more than enough to provide for a family, a home, and early retirement. Burning down the next generation by empowering mega corporations just "for your kids" is the definition of selfish. Boomers did selfish things "for their kids" and now their kids are absolutely screwed with climate change and a worse off economic system.

But yes, they did certainly provide for their own retirement--at the cost of the whole world. FAANG developers are the same. Amazon and Apple can pay fat checks to their tech workers because they cut costs and shamelessly exploit everyone working in their lower level positions. Eventually they'll push everyone down to lower levels and have the technology to enforce it without human interference.

But hey, someone bought their kid a nice car and they retired to the Bahamas and got a few maids with that huge developer check. Got to look at the bright side.

[robertlagrant]

Don't be silly; it's not at the cost of the whole world.

We are still in a pandemic where one of the biggest reasons people could isolate for as long as they did was big tech.

[grapeskin]

Quarantines have existed for a long time. Countries locked down for longer.

The most important thing holding the world together was the people out there risking infection to deliver things to people staying at home. The biggest difference between the 90s and 2020s is that people are doing it by pressing a button on their phone instead of pressing a button on their computer or making a call on their phone, and loads more people are working in the package delivery industry for low wages.

[robertlagrant]

> Quarantines have existed for a long time. Countries locked down for longer.

Can you give some examples?

The rest of your analysis seems incomplete. Some examples:

Zoom, Slack Facebook and WhatsApp able to keep professional, personal and family relationships alive was essential to so much continuing to function, allowing a vast number of employees to shift to online working. One notable point (of thousands) here is that while healthcare waiting lists got longer, many consultations that could be done over video, a thing never thought feasible before, meaning more isolation possibilities for vulnerable patients (and clinical staff).

Having online shops able to update listings in seconds, rather than your example of the 90s where catalogues would be sent out every six months with new stock for you to phone up and buy, or rather, not be able to get through to, was also awesome. Modern logistics means packages and returns can be done incredibly easily and fitted into your day, rather than spending ages on the phone with a human operator.

Uber and derivatives meant that the increased load of shutting down public transport could be transferred onto a dynamic fleet of private citizens' cars, and the traditional taxi firms also didn't require scaling human operators to book, and Google Maps powered the routing for those drivers.

And the rise of cloud infrastructure has meant in general that many services, government and private, have sprung into being in record time.

And those are just the first examples that occur to me.

[shreyshnaccount]

When you unironically say that resources like housing and education are scarce, that shows how messed up our world is right now.

[jokethrowaway]

Those people taking 300k salaries and building amazon.com are also contributing to creating value for the customers of amazon.com.

Is the value created for the customers of amazon.com less or more significant for society at large than people who can't get a better job than minimum wage, voluntarily working for minimum wage?

There is no moral right or wrong. I personally hate amazon and I would never work for them (even if I'm impressed by what Bezos achieved) but I don't judge people working for amazon. I judge way more people working for the IRS, that's a proper criminal enterprise.

[brtkdotse]

Whenever I hear the phrase “creating value” I think of this comic strip:

https://mobile.twitter.com/benioff/status/549339156854214656

[hef19898]

If you work at Amazon, as I did, regardless of what you do you are part of the system. And that system, ultimately, creates value for AMZN's shareholders. And first and foremost Jeff Bezos.

The line so is based on how far down the food chain you are. Blue Collar employees, the drivers, warehouse workers and so on, are not part of the problem. White collar employees, pretty much so. I say that as a former White Collar Amazonian. Amazon, so to be fair, is just among the more extreme manifestations of rampant, unregulated capitalism. And it's not that all the other logistics companies are treating their blue collar employees any better. On average, so there are always those exceptions of great employers and great managers everywhere. Unfortunately those are becoming rarer by the day.