Well-off devs like the guy who quit Amazon don't have $$$ issues, so he can afford to do that.
Others don't, and that doesn't make them bad.
That makes them care for their family first.
That was the entire point. He addressed your concern in the first two paragraphs.
And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you’re in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds for your kids.
I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had FU money, which also means a few million in diversified assets other than my house. Especially in the US, where quality healthcare is a minimum $20k per year for a family in insurance premiums alone plus a few ten thousands in out of pocket costs.
So every job switch is rolling the dice and wading through no-mans land. Sure devs can move back to their home country, but that could mean uprooting their lives or even be potentially life-threathening. Moving jobs can be painful, up-rooting lives to move back is a much more terrifying prospect.
The point of my article is that you should be held accountable for things which are within your control, and for US citizens working as programmers, the choice of where to work is very much within their control.
Neither income nor wealth growth are zero sum games. This whole post reads like a bunch of excuses.
I wouldn't say they are grossly underpaid as much as I'd say executives (not necessarily all management) is grossly overpaid. The market has failed us.
People tell me to not look at someone else's plate to see how much more they have than I do but it doesn't make sense when so much wealth/power is concentrated at the top.
Btw, I don't make FAANG level salaries so I can't speak for them. I still believe there is a magic number like maybe 10, 50, or up to 100 which is a multiplier of the minimum wage above which the income tax must be 90%+
So for example, if the magic number is 50 and minimum wage is $15, then $15 * 50 * 2000 (a year), then income above 1.5M would be subject to the highest level bracket. I sincerely believe the magic number should be no greater than 100.
This argument only holds water when you're making a lot of money relative to the cost of living where you live.
Most software engineers, even at FANG, aren't really earning that much relative to cost of living. A $70k salary in most of the rest of the country buys you a better quality of life and allows you to better support your family than $180k in the SF Bay Area. You also need to remember that as you go up in salary, the government takes more and more of each incremental dollar.
My older brother for example is an out of work chef and married to a nurse and lives in another state. He has a nicer house and is raising two kids, while my partner and I gross about 3-4x what they are earning.
In other words, you feel that you cannot be secure unless you're in the, what, top 5% of the society? You can't have an entire society living on passive income until the AI revolution delivers.
And until you feel secure, everything is justified at work?
One of the real, hard, lessons of the coronavirus situation is that security is collective. You can hole up for a while, and avoid catching the virus yourself, but the economic effects will get everywhere.
You're right, you're not secure from all possible reductions in peak earnings. You may sacrifice some potential income and future wealth by switching jobs. There will always be richer neighbourhoods & schools, so that may mean risking a sacrifice in future lifestyle. But that's not the kind of risk that the article is talking about.
Most people can't leave their jobs because if they do so then they immediately risk not making rent, not feeding themselves/their families, or losing healthcare entirely. In practice, that means they really do have no choice: very few people will give up food for the greater good, and it's not reasonable to expect them to.
Successful programmers are not in that position though. You absolutely have a choice. The choice you're describing is between optimizing for peak wealth or trading a small part of that wealth for the greater good, at no substantial cost to your lifestyle. If greater personal wealth is always more valuable to you than any greater good then perhaps this doesn't feel like a choice either, but you're well past most people's line for reasonably ethical behaviour at that point.
That is, from any objective viewpoint, absurd. Moreover, it's a recipe for talking yourself into an ever-extended stay in a situation that, fundamentally, doesn't comport with your values. I don't say this to attack the OP – I've seen the same process happen to good people, seen people feel "poor/underpaid" while making $200k.
Instead, my focus is on the other people. Pay attention to OP, and realize just how powerful an influence the right (wrong) "circle of friends and family" can be. Imo, you should think very carefully before spending your life around a circle that would cause you to think financial security requires $7 million.
It's an extremely privileged view to have. Especially given that exactly 0 companies, anywhere, will do everything you agree with.
The fact that you refer to it as a magic number implies that this at best wishful thinking.
Hence the need for FU money because the collective decisions are/will be lousy. You do not want to be dependent on the collective for security.
I personally wouldn’t do it without talking things over with mine but if I felt strongly about leaving a job on ethical grounds I’m pretty sure my family would support that decision. You are after all just another member of the family that also needs support.
To be clear, we're not talking about risking food & shelter here. We're talking about risking one fewer skiing holiday a year, or buying the house with the slightly smaller swimming pool.
Building tools for mass surveillance, undermining employment regulations worldwide, addicting people to abusive tech, exploiting warehouse workers, breaking the law, propping up authoritarian governments. There's nothing you can think of that you'd put above your family's luxuries?
They (FAANG engineers) absolutely earn a salary which would allow them to live a ordinary life with much to spare, but the world is full of people who don't want to be ordinary.
I agree. It is wishful thinking at the moment but it isn't entirely unreasonable. This is about individual income tax and not corporate income tax (which is a completely different thing altogether which I can't tax like individual income even in my make-believe world [0]).
I think individual income tax changes I propose are very reasonable. I'd say if you are wealthy, my proposal is very much preferable to a wealth tax.
[0] For example, according to https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WMT/financials?ltr=1 the trailing twelve months, Walmart total revenue was ~523B, cost of revenue ~394B, and the most important bottom line, income before tax was only ~$20B. Ideally, we should be taxing revenue with no regard to expenses but there is no good way I can think of to do that other than drastically decreasing the tax rate to max out at about 2% so this is a different discussion altogether and likely not very fruitful.
Grouping together millionaires with software developers working at Google doesn't make sense to me.
This whole debate is about drawing a line in the sand about morality that is convenient for the author. The same exact arguments could be made for any number of things anybody does every single day.
Hint hint.
That's one of the side effects of a strong hiring field in technology. You can, in fact, in most cases, put your butt in a seat that aligns with your values. To act like that isn't the reality for most individuals involved in the tech industry, especially in SV, is disingenuous at best.
Source/reasoning for my views: I am not in a position that I can move jobs based on values. Luckily, 75% of my values align with my institution.
Your sentence really sounds like just an 'I got mine, so forget everyone else' sort of statement.
Your FU money doesn't mean a damned thing if societal norms die due to a pandemic or disaster. If anything, they'll just make you a target for the actual collective when it gets bad.
You can't help yourself, by yourself, if the whole world is crumbling. You have to be dependent on the collective for security. That's the literal point of a society existing. We have societal norms and collective good for a reason.
We used to kill a lot of the rich people, every so often, in history. Why have we forgotten that?
We aren't talking about a French revolution type event here. In anything from Katrina to the Great Depression to even this current pandemic, financial security was/is crucial for maintaining your own well being.
And in the modern world where you can travel, it needs to be a truly global collapse for couple hundred thousand saved to not offer a path to safety.
I find refusing to "build the tools of oppression" more defensible on utilitarian grounds than denying to even use such tools (apart from practical considerations, that is e.g. vendor lockdown, privacy issues etc).
And yet you already claim to be boycotting evil corporations, which in my eyes amounts to pretty much that.
I suppose I can buy the "we shouldn't normalize morally wrong behaviour" as long as it remains defensible on utilitarian grounds i.e. working for megacorps. But I have a hard time seeing my use of e.g. google translate as morally wrong.
A high salary today is meaningless if you are out of a job tomorrow.
That line of thinking is very disingenuous. Every worker probably has at least a few disagreements, morally speaking, with their leadership. That's how the world works.
Obtuse? Nice try.