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by drzaiusapelord 4205 days ago
>mainstream America just collectively forgot how it felt to have enough money.

Yeah, no more easy line of credits for deadbeats and people with zero collateral who want to flip a home they can't afford and sell at a price that won't work. Banks shouldn't provide insurance for investing.

> We have become accustomed to the 60 hour work weeks for folks fortunate enough to have jobs

This kind of thing happened way before the recession and the mythical 1950s worker who went home right a 5 is just that, a myth.

> chronic unemployment for those unfortunate enough to work outside of tech

Tech sucks. I know blue-collar guys who paint or install drywall making my salary. Except they have no student loans, no office politics, etc to worry about. Granted a lot of them pay union dues, but its okay as Joe Taxpayer has agreed to pay their pensions. Do nothing jobs like HR pay six figures. The average salary for a Chicago school teacher is $85,000. If you think tech has all the money you obviously have no finance, lawyer, or doctor friends.

>Being poor is the new norm

If you're an American, you're far from poor, globally.

It bothers me that there's so much whining from people nowadays. Its like they never became a bazaillionare so they buy into the fallacious "things were better in the past" mumbo-jumbo. Yeah, the past wasn't too bad but try not to be black or asian or latino or a woman back then if you wanted to get ahead.

It also helped that the rest of the world was rebuilding from WWII while we had all our infrastructure, business, etc still intact. Maybe being relatively poorer is a good thing if it takes a world war to make us "rich."

2 comments

I've been seeing a lot of these types of articles lately, trying to convince how bad off the American worker is and how those fat cats in the 1% are siphoning all of the wealth away. I've also noticed a recent uptick in socialist-populist activity. I'm not sure which is the cart and which is the horse but it seems like articles like this have a specific political agenda in mind.
Do nothing jobs like HR pay six figures

Not to fresh college graduates, they don't. Six figures in HR is seniority pay.

The vast majority of entry-level office jobs available today pay very poorly compared to junior SDE. An entry-level HR coordinator is typically making ~$20/hour.

Six figures is seniority pay in almost any field outside of medicine, particularly if you exclude the Standford PhD folks going straight to Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.

$20/hr is about $40k a year. I don't live in in a city, so my first job as a developer was $42k a year. I think it's safe the say the developers I worked with provided more value than the HRC.

It's not like developers are unique in having lower wages outside of cities. Entry-level HR people in your location probably made significantly less than you.
If you did live in a city, and you were seeking your first job as a developer today, you could expect your first job to pay at least double that, with just a bachelor's in CS. I live in Seattle and entry-level SDE jobs here typically pay $80k+. I hear that Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon start in the low six figures.

Meanwhile other entry-level office jobs are still around that ~$20/hr or ~$40k/year (depending on whether they're overtime exempt or not) level.