Not sure if this is the best comm for this post, but it really hit home with me, and is getting some good discussion in my circles.
Not sure if this is the best comm for this post, but it really hit home with me, and is getting some good discussion in my circles.
How poor can you be working in tech? You ostensibly have a college degree and make a decent salary. Maybe at a start up you don't have great benefits or a high salary, but in the bay area you have to be making at least $80k, right?
Not trying to justify the mistreatment of workers. Tech the world over, especially tech startups, is a petit boug stomping ground. The difference between people who went to state schools on scholarship and people who went to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, etc is more than just a piece of paper. The tech area is a confluence of boug cultural identity and proletarian cultural identity. At least in the first world.
it's more about learned class behavior
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That's definitely true. I just have a hard time empathizing with bay area tech folks. I understand that they're essentially tech slaves. A lot of them are my former classmates. But they do it out of their own false petit boug consciousness, not because it's necessary for them to survive. And yeah, they're slumming it now, but it's because they think that they'll be the new money bourgeoise.
I think the writer of this article is probably excluded from this category of people. This is just me ranting about my hatred for the petit boug tech industry and all the lolbertarian and painfully liberal landlord shitheads I have to work with.
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oaklands pretty cheap, 80k will get you pretty far there. it sounds like a lot of her coworkers were just from rich families and making more money than her
According to her bio, she was a high-school drop-out, but graduated from UC Berkeley. She notes that one of the differences between her and her cow-orkers is that she was paying off college loans, and they weren't. But I think the overall discussion of differences is about growing up poor, not about staying poor while working in tech.
There are a lot of well endowed kids who go through private university and land high paying jobs in tech, but a college degree isn't the only path to working in the industry. Often times a portfolio of open source work will also open the door. Things are a bit more wacky in the start-up scene though.
Before a start-up receives any kind of institutional funding, it will have to go through a bootstrapping phase where workers often work for free in exchange for equity in the company. You could spend several months working on software trying to build a minimum viable product while trying to nail down some first round investors. I spent three months working in a start-up like this for a 10% stake in the company and went completely destitute in the process. We never managed to raise any capital and by the end of the process I owned 10% of nothing.
what the actual fuck? is this common?
Unfortunately yes. You can go on Angelist and check out some of the job description.
If the company makes it you're set for life.
Literally a [potential] ticket to the ruling class. Still takes a ton of privilege to attempt, but it's a high risk-high reward type deal (sorry it didn't work out Porkroll). Of course it shouldn't work this way, but I definitely don't see it as a worker exploitation type thing personally.
cabidalist tages on risg
If she's making 80k and married (maybe single-income family?) while balancing student loans it is absolutely possible to be legitimately poor in the Bay Area. Not dirt poor, not housing-insecure poor, but basically living paycheck-to-paycheck poor.
It's a myth that tech jobs = high pay. Some people make a ton of money but a lot of other people working in tech don't. I've been working in tech for about seven years now and I make significantly less than a carpenter or a plumber.