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.
The closing paragraphs of this article remind me of the idea that the rich already live in a sort of post-scarcity, currency-free, stateless bubble, while the rest of us toil to make that possible for them. Bezos and Gates and all never have to think about whether there will be enough food, or if they need to carry cash, or how to move across borders - everything is always handled for them.
The fact that we still live in this world disgusts them. It's why they have such contempt for us.
That we should criticize them is infuriating. They'll take a private plane to a climate change conference and fuck you for having a problem with it, prole.
Not tech, but I know more than one person who got hired into top tier PMC professions (think consulting, accounting, law, etc) who ended up working so much overtime that they would have had more money in hand if they had worked the same hours at a minimum wage job.
Shit can be really bad, even for professions that were once considered golden meal tickets.
"Stay in school, work very hard, excel academically, and one day you too will be exploited for your labor for a few dollars an hour."
I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I had the only fat body in the building. Gym membership was included in my benefits. I went half a dozen times before it was made crystal clear to me that I did not belong
As a (formerly) poor and overweight person, I absolutely can't relate to this. Every single person I met at the gym was very supportive, my coworkers regularly offered me to join their free voleyball/basketball leagues and I was literally the biggest person in the building.
I understand that a lot of it is ingrained self-loathing and shame and I experience it too, but I wouldn't project it onto other people, even though some of them are definitely shitty
I'm not familiar with different cultures in US so it's hard for me to understand, but I appreciate the explanation
They're saying that this is in a much less elitist-liberal sort of area.
Southern California and the New York megalopolis are stereotypically shallow and elitist, while the Midwest kind of lets it hang out, is generally a lot friendlier, and less obsessed about appearance. But even in the Midwest they ran into those kind of classist rich snobs, which certainly exist.
Yeah I would guess it's a class/status thing more than a weight thing. Rich people use the gym to show off their Lulu outfit
I was working for a guy who co-founded a certain frozen desert business sometime back and he was always an "ideas" guy. Anyways he really liked how I managed and my personality and stuff and asked me to be his top operator for his new venture he was pitching to his dozen or so VC friends/associates. So I'd have to go in the city constantly to accompany him when we'd pitch the business. Eventually I told him I've spent at least $150 on traveling and ofc a lot of time and it was starting to actually be rather detrimental since no one was biting and I actually couldn't keep spending half a day in the city not working or being paid. He just could not understand how this was an issue because he had so much passive income. He also commented that I only had like two (deeply discounted) suits and maybe 4 dress shirts. He didn't like I was always wearing a variation of the same stuff. Just straight up didn't realize him paying me the $11hr (a bit above min wage at the time) while I kept having to not work and no compensation while doing all that was legit no longer possible for me. So he "found someone who is more comitted."
There is more to it all but he legit pleaded with me when I found a better job with more hours and actual benefits. So I made a simple demand of matching the same pay because that job I was doing was solid and close to where I lived. He couldn't even give me a dollar more and hour and didn't understand paying $400/mo through his healthcare plan would in fact be much worse for me. Just completely clueless or just stupidly greedy
frozen desert business
So you worked in the tundra?
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Tip your server.
I work in tech and I had almost the same experience. A sales guy came into the office I share with a few colleagues for a chat and started to talk about the renovations they were doing on their house. He's a nice guy and he was really happy about his new floors or whatever. In a different timeline I would have loved to talk DIY and construction stuff with him, I love that shit, but in this one I just became sad knowing that my chances of ever owning my own home, let alone do expensive remodeling on it, are laughably low.
The worst part of it is that he's a really shitty salesman whereas I'm pretty decent at what I do. Yet he's the one living in the big nice house whereas we're living in an apartment that is too small.
I hate myself for being this envious. I hate capitalism for constructing this bullshit inequality and I hate it for making me feel bad and ashamed about being in this hopeless situation.
A table for playing board games/DnD. The main things that make it different than a regular table are that the top slides off to reveal a large inset where you can keep a game in play, and also the walls of the inset prevent dice from rolling off. The fancy ones also have convenient cupholders and mini desks that fold out from under to hold character sheets or scrabble tiles or other game pieces.
What they also are are not so hard to build for yourself if you don't care about the prestige of a name brand. Back before the pandemic made lumber prices spike, I built one for six people for like 200 dollars total cost. Even had cupholders. Plans are all on the internet.
It is a kiten table with usb power and like dice trays built in. Some other stuff depensing on how much you pay for it. Speakers, or cool moving sections.
It was kinda rad and a bunch of people built them on reddit for a while. I kinda hope they are the ones selling them but I doubt it.
I generally liked this,
but two points stuck out to me as odd. Firstly, I would assume she's making a similar amount of money as her coworkers. I haven't worked in the tech-startup scene, but unless they all have other sorts of income, which is possible, that makes a big part of this feel more like pandering? There's also calling out her coworkers for eating free seaweed snacks, and her boss for having a salad and "vegan soup." Vegetables aren't just for rich people, I don't really get why that was the focus of the fist few lines.The rest of this resonated pretty well with me, as I've recently moved from working labor to working in "tech." There's definitely a culture shock, and a weird shame for getting paid so much more to do what feels like so much less work.
Edit: Ignore my first point. The author states that she was the lowest paid person in the office, because she didn't know how much to ask for.
Edit 2: I want to rescind the first paragraph of my comment in it's entirety. This has stuck with me. It's some heavy reading, and I feel like my comment was reactionary and based on a misunderstanding.
She notes that she was making less than the interns or the receptionist, partly because she had no idea how much to ask for.
You're right, I saw less than "executive assistant" and missed the rest. Yeah, if she's the lowest paid person in the building a lot of this makes more sense.
Another one that was weird to me is associating a rec soccer league with actual bougie hobbies.
She claimed to make less than the interns there fwiw
Yeah I missed the lowest paid person in the office part. But you're right the hobbies stood out a bit to me too. I understand not having time outside work, but it isn't bourgeoisie to have other interests in life. Soccer is communal costs nothing but time, and even rock climbing has a pretty low barrier to entry compared to golfing and sailing and the like.
In my experience, adult soccer leagues are definitely made up of rich people. It's not soccer itself - if you have a few friends or are able to find a group of strangers to meet up with, then yeah for sure - but signing up for an established adult soccer league can be super expensive. Not to mention the gear you have to buy.
Overall it's the cultural difference, the author COULD have joined in on many of these activities, including the vegan soup lunch (although knowing tech people I imagine it was an insanely expensive soup). But there's a huge cultural barrier to be involved in the first place, not to mention even wanting to be involved.
Soccer in itself is a proletarian sport, you don't "need" fancy equipment, at the most basic level you just need a ball and something to mark goals.
Making it bougie is a heinous crime to me.
Totally agree! This is just my experience in the US, definitely not the case elsewhere in the world. And like I said, nothing is stopping proles from getting together without fancy gear.
Rock climbing only cost like $150 for the gear and it will last you for years. But a membership to an indoor climbing gym in a place like that is likely over $100 a month. Even sports like soccer if you're playing in a club, which I assume her rich co-workers were, can get expensive. I had to drop out of rugby because not only was the $40 a month for dues hard for me but I also could never mesh with the team cause everyone would go out to eat together after almost every practice and I could never afford to.
This is true. I've never been big into rock climbing, but I have some friends who are and I live in an area with a handful of natural walls not too far away, so all of my experience has been pretty cheap. But your point on club dues and the extra social outings is fair. I don't have much experience living outside the rural/suburban parts of the Midwest, so I forget that folks will find ways to make their social groups even more exclusive.
This is a hard truth. I'm a relatively successful tech entrepreneur (was acquired...it went, OK). The tech startup founder's scene is primarily made up of trust fund kids whose parents are essentially "buying them jobs" so they can quit making excuses at the country club. They also have substantial safety nets which allow them to "run" companies like coked out manic baitfish.
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.
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.
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.
a bootstrapping phase where workers often work for free in exchange for equity in the company
what the actual fuck? is this common?
Unfortunately yes. You can go on Angelist and check out some of the job description.
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.
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.
Is it common for a tech startup to have a billionaire CEO? I thought startups were usually like 10 people, but they have an HR as well.
Could be a billionaire that got their money from a successful business then founded another one, which is still in startup phase.
Yeah I think tech/software is so infested by "startup culture" that there are a lot of "vc startup unicorn disruptor" companies that, in any normal industry, would just be new desks in an unused corner of an office building inhabited by 10 new hires.
I don't know the exact definition of a startup since Uber is still considered a startup but I have seen a few with no HR department.
