[kotaKat]

"Tech workers"?

"a salary of more than $500,000 in her most recent position, as a mid-tier executive at Meta"

I'm sorry, but if you're making over half a million in TC a year, you can have an emergency fund set aside as an overpaid executive.

How many actual tech workers (the ones making under $100k, lol) are facing even harder financial security than the first-world-problems of some Facebook exec who could afford two nannies?

[branon]

My thoughts were along this line too. Being laid off is unfortunate, but being laid off after making $500k/yr for a mid-level managerial position is a karmic self-correction.

The opening sentence of the article even tacitly admits this - "Susan Smith considered herself a winner in the American economic lottery" - the operative word here is "lottery" and I am not altogether surprised the type of person to coast on Facebook money for decades found themselves hard up after it got cut off.

[NewCzech]

One of the things that surprised me in Silicon Valley is that my colleagues who were making $500K-$1M a year levered up their lives and saved surprisingly little. Multiple houses, $200K cars, nannies, very expensive vacations, you name it.

[bumblehean]

Many people across all income levels are really bad at dealing with personal finances and long-term financial planning.

[blitzar]

People are yet to realise that the "tech bro" genome isn't different from the "finance bro" genome.

[0xmattf]

>I'm sorry, but if you're making over half a million in TC a year, you can have an emergency fund set aside

Seriously. It boggles my mind how people can earn this much money, yet face difficulties when they lose their job. I guess they're people who didn't grow up poor and/or are too hungry for material things.

There's very little I want or need in this world; if I were making $500k, I'd be able to somewhat retire within 2-3 years.

[ElevenLathe]

Americans' political education has been deliberately hobbled. An educated person (let alone a journalist) in most of the rest of the developed world (and lots of the developing world) would know instinctively not to call an executive a "worker".

That said, I believe there probably are workers (in the sense of having the same class interests as other workers rather than the owners, like an executive does) in the Bay Area that earn these kinds of numbers. Again, this is something that a proper political education would make very clear, but anything that smacks of a materialist or class-based analysis is now completely verboten at most levels of the education system because it is considered "Marxism," an enemy ideology.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The class division you're inferring just doesn't exist within Silicon Valley tech companies. Mid-level executives are overwhelmingly people who started as what you'd consider a worker and grew into that role. (There is something of a class divide between Silicon Valley companies, although not one that aligns well with typical Marxist analysis.)

[ElevenLathe]

Being promoted to management doesn't make you not management, if I'm understanding what you're saying. That's how most (middle) managers are minted in every industry I'm aware of: promoting line workers. That doesn't mean those newly-promoted managers have the same class interests as the people they manage. I work in tech but only in big firms and never in the Bay Area, so perhaps there is some nuance I'm missing?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Marxist class analysis was developed for situations where that wasn't the case. The clearest example in the US would be trucking (and it's not a coincidence that trucking has one of the highest unionization rates): the people directing where trucks should go have often never driven one themselves, and the people driving the trucks rarely expect that if they drive well for a few years they'll be promoted out of a driving position.

My understanding is that outside the US this dynamic is more common in a variety of industries.

[ElevenLathe]

Yeah I mean Marx himself lived in a world where the aristocracy was still a going concern. Still, management is fundamentally aligned with ownership. If anything, the dynamic you're citing (line workers being promoted into the lower rungs of management) means that line workers themselves have incentive to align themselves with ownership (as a way of auditioning for the job of doing that for money, as management). It definitely doesn't make the managers less aligned with ownership. There are good reasons management can't join a union.

Again, this is basic political education everywhere else in the world. This is what other countries' schoolchildren are learning while ours are learning why it was actually good and necessary to nuke Japan, how "manifest destiny" is also ultimately good and moral, and how the Civil War was mainly about something abstract called "states' rights".