[hellotomyrars]

You say that but I don’t think it’s entirely fair. The tech industry is often living in an entirely different world. Hearing SWEs in places like SF and Seattle who are personally bothered and upset because homeless people have the gall to exist and they have to see them makes me want to scream.

Also SWE often just have the worst attitudes and egos to rival surgeons who think they’re gods. Real talk: a lot of them are working on shit that doesn’t matter to anyone and is a solution looking for a problem. SWE are very often not producing anything of value to anyone. The entire startup industry is predicated on the hope that you’ll exist long enough to get a giant payday from the big boys.

The person who fixes your toilet did real work with a tangible benefit. The person who takes care of your grandmother by cooking/bathing/shopping for her is doing real work that has a tangible benefit. They don’t get paid anything comparable to a SWE who is making Uber for dogs or the 15th messaging system that Google will shut down after a year.

Maybe SWEs are overvalued for their output compared to other people.

[elzbardico]

Software engineers will usually build whatever investors decided to give them money to build. So far, at least for the VCs and the Wall Street people those things you call useless seem to be pretty much in demand. If you don’t like and I have to somewhat agree with you here, you should complain with the folks that cut the checks not the ones cashing them.

I do a lot of manual work at home and even at friends for free. I can build a house, I can solder stuff, fix my own plumbing and yes, it is hard work, but most of those things don’t have a big barrier of entry. So, supply and demand apply.

Recognizing homelessness as a problem and feeling threatened and disgusted by it is not an exclusivity of software engineers, and if you talk to blue collar folks you’d be surprised to find that they see the problem in a far more heavy handed way than our average googlezen. Compulsory rehab would create frissons of indignation in our average habitats while being absolutely popular amongst construction and factory workers.

[hellotomyrars]

I 100% agree the issue is more on the capital side. There probably shouldn’t be people who have more money than God who can afford to thrown hundreds of million dollar darts at a wall and see what sticks.

But I still think the downstream effect is an attitude in many SWE that divorce them from reality. Most people don’t get paid incredibly large sums of money on work that amounts to a gamble, with high risk and high reward. The failure rate for small businesses isn’t trivial but they’re not playing in the same part of the casino as tech. Tradespeople aren’t afforded the luxury of building entirely speculative things that are going to be dead within a year or two. People expect their homes and the things in them to have a much longer shelf life.

My point about seeing some of the things Google/Amazon/Apple folks have said regarding the homeless is that those are very much people working in the industry that made Seattle/SF impossible for “normal” people to afford to live in. There are many reasons people become homeless and why they stay that way but being literally priced out of a place you may have been born and raised in and lived for decades is a very special kind of fucked.

That said, if the capital side of things wasn’t the runaway nightmare monster it was, SWE probably would and should be making less than they do now on average.

It costs more to be poor. Closing the gap absolutely means raising the minimum standard of living but wealthy inequality absolutely goes both ways and it isn’t going to get better unless things contract on both ends. Raising things up at the bottom does mean lowering things at the top. The impact isn’t linear though.

Obviously the real world has other ideas but there should be less people with more money than God and that does mean less money for SWEs. But the face value of money and the absolute value of money aren’t the same either.

But I also don’t things are going to be getting better anytime soon so it’s somewhat of a moot point. The incentives aren’t aligned and unfortunately the people who are playing an idle game are going to squeeze every last cent out of the people who can still afford to buy food to feed their family, but only just.