[dreamdu5t]

Engineers don't make that much money. Yes, I live a middle-class lifestyle. But even without owning a car, not having a child, etc. After saving for retirement and eating healthy food, I simply don't have that much savings to start any business that requires a decent amount of capital to get going - at least not without burning through everything fairly quickly. At most I could take a couple of months off and destroy that savings the buffer against job loss and other emergencies.

I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...

[Avshalom]

>>But even without owning a car, not having a child, etc.

>>I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...

Last year I lived in Austin TX, owned a car, ate healthy, lived 15 minutes from the city center and made 29000 before taxes. Of which I managed to save 15000.

The world doesn't think software engineers are so rich, we think anyone above 50K is rich, because for a lot of us thats double what we make a year, and many of us are supporting families on that. The idea that some one making 75-100k could be living paycheck to paycheck is fucking baffling to the half the population making less than 42k per household.

[dionidium]

What's happening is that upper-middle class families really do run out of money after saving for college, sending the kids to private school, both driving two new cars, and so on. They think of those things as basics and forget that those basics are unattainable to most.

[Avshalom]

Right. Hedonistic treadmill/keeping up with the jonses/we rate our lives compared to our peers not compared to objective rock bottom etc... And of course "fucking baffling" was a bit of a rhetorical flourish. Certainly we all understand how they've managed to spend all their money. It's the "and yet they keep spending all their money" that makes us want to grab them by the shirt collars and cartoonishly backhand them.

[gohrt]

Note that "saving for college" means "saving to pay for their kid's tuition AND ALSO pay for the financial that goes to a family earning $50k/yr".

And two cars (not necessarily new) because both parents are driving to work.

And property tax that pays for public school for kids of less real-estate-wealthy folks

Also marginal tax rate (Federal, state, social security) of ~30-40% on the difference in income.

[dionidium]

You can't list those first three things and then also -in the last one. The last one encompasses the first three.

[sukilot]

That is incorrect. Tuition and property tax is not the same as income tax.

[crpatino]

> I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...

Everybody know how much a programmer makes in Silicon Valley, and think everyone in the industry is paid accordingly. Also, high cost of living in SF area is not that well known (or at least, not understood to be correlated) by the masses.

It's a bit like saying every football/basketball player is a millionaire. Those that play in the professional leagues, yes. The ones that end up coaching pee-whee teams, not so much.

[candu]

The US median household income is ~$50k/year, while the US median personal income is ~$35k/year. The average Bay Area software engineer earns ~$100k/year, which is above the 90th percentile of US personal income...

...and if you want to talk global, $100k/year is beyond the wildest dreams of most everyone on Earth. (For that matter, so is starting a capital-intensive business.)

You can probably see where this perception comes from.

[dionidium]

Because even in the midwest it's not difficult for an individual engineer to make twice the median household income. That doesn't make you rich, but I have no idea how anybody could think that's not well off.