| The median income in the US is $41k for all workers and $56k for full-time, year-round workers. $71k is the average household income. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat... In your CNBC article everything is based on household income. Many SWEs would be classed as not middle class based on their own income let alone household income. The median SWE salary in the US is $110k: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/.... If you take increased salary due to location and partner salary into account, the majority of SWEs are easily upper middle class. > In places like San Francisco where the cost of living is significantly higher, you would need to be earning ~230k a year to be in the upper middle class A solo entry level FAANG engineer basically qualifies for upper middle class. Add a partner and you're definitely upper middle class. > And even with FAANG the salary between an engineer at Amazon and one at Google is going to vastly differ, especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at What are you talking about with "especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at"? As far as I've seen Retail vs AWS doesn't have different comp. Google and Amazon also have pretty similar comp: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Amazon&track=Software.... Their comp bands likely have a lot of overlap. Differences are more likely to be based on negotiation than working for Google vs Amazon. |
My argument has always been that they exist in the middle class. The fact that median income being low isn't indicative of them not being middle class, but rather that the continued squeeze on salary among all middle class workers has resulted in a shrinking of who actually is middle class and what that income means.