Wrestling Forum banner

Scraping by on six figures? Tech workers feel poor in Silicon Valley's wealth bubble

1K views 17 replies 11 participants last post by  Miss Sally 
#1 · (Edited)
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...crisis-has-americas-highest-paid-feeling-poor

I don't usually put too much stock on The Guardian, but I'll be damned if this didn't take me by complete and utter surprise:

Scraping by on six figures? Tech workers feel poor in Silicon Valley's wealth bubble
“I didn’t become a software engineer to be trying to make ends meet,” said a Twitter employee in his early 40s who earns a base salary of $160,000. It is, he added, a “pretty bad” income for raising a family in the Bay Area.
The biggest cost is his $3,000 rent – which he said was “ultra cheap” for the area – for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and two kids. He’d like a slightly bigger property, but finds himself competing with groups of twentysomethings happy to share accommodation while paying up to $2,000 for a single room.
“Families are priced out of the market,” he said, adding that family-friendly cafes and restaurants have slowly been replaced by “hip coffee shops”.

Silicon Valley super-rich head south to escape from a global apocalypse

Silicon Valley’s latest tech boom has caused rents to soar over the last five years. The city’s rents, by one measure, are now the highest in the world.

The prohibitive costs have displaced teachers, city workers, firefighters and other members of the middle class, not to mention low-income residents.
Now techies, many of whom are among the highest 1% of earners, are complaining that they, too, are being priced out.
The Twitter employee said he hit a low point in early 2014 when the company changed its payroll schedule, leaving him with a hole in his budget. “I had to borrow money to make it through the month.”

He was one of several tech workers, earning between $100,000 and $700,000 a year, who vented to the Guardian about their financial situation. Almost all of them spoke only on the condition of anonymity, or agreed only to give their first names, fearing retribution by their employers for speaking publicly about their predicament.
‘The American dream is not working out here’

Complaints from well-compensated tech workers will sound like chutzpah to many of the other 99% who are struggling to get by on a fraction of their income. But there appears to be a growing frustration among tech workers who say that they are struggling to get by.
Facebook engineers last year even raised the issue with founder Mark Zuckerberg, asking whether the company could subsidize their rents to make their living situation more affordable, according to an executive at the company who has since departed.

The cost of housing is a common complaint among Bay Area techies. Engineers can expect, according to one analysis, to pay between 40% and 50% of their salary renting an apartment near work.

One Apple employee was recently living in a Santa Cruz garage, using a compost bucket as a toilet. Another tech worker, enrolled in a coding bootcamp, described how he lived with 12 other engineers in a two-bedroom apartment rented via Airbnb. “It was $1,100 for a fucking bunk bed and five people in the same room. One guy was living in a closet, paying $1,400 for a ‘private room’.”
“We make over $1m between us, but we can’t afford a house,” said a woman in her 50s who works in digital marketing for a major telecoms corporation, while her partner works as an engineer at a digital media company. “This is part of where the American dream is not working out here.”
We went to an open house that would shorten my commute by ​​eight miles. It sold in 24 hours for $1.7m
The prospect of losing her job and not having health insurance is a particular concern, given that she had cancer a couple of years ago. “If Obamacare goes away and I lose my job I am deeply screwed,” she said.
Michelle, a 28-year-old tech worker who earns a six-figure salary at a data science startup said her only chance of buying a home would be if she combined income with a partner. “For all the feminist movement of ‘you can do it all’, the concept of home ownership is really truly out of reach,” she said. “For me that’s disheartening.”
Another tech worker feeling excluded from the real estate market was 41-year-old Michael, who works at a networking firm in Silicon Valley and last year earned $700,000. Sick of his 22-mile commute to work, which can sometimes take up to two and half hours, he explored buying a property nearer work.
“We went to an open house in Los Gatos that would shorten my commute by eight miles. It was 1,700 sq ft and listed at $1.4m. It sold in 24 hours for $1.7m,” he said.

How America counts its homeless – and why so many are overlooked

Although he said his salary means he can afford to live a decent life, he finds the cost of living, combined with the terrible commute, unpalatable. He’s had enough, and has accepted a 50% pay cut to relocate to San Diego.
“We will be unequivocally better off than we are now.” He said he won’t miss some of the more mundane day-to-day costs, like spending $8 on a bagel and coffee or $12 on freshly pressed juice.
Michael isn’t the only tech worker considering leaving Silicon Valley in search of a better life. A Canadian IT specialist in his late 40s, earning more than $200,000, has a similar plan. “When I came to the Bay Area the amount of money they were going to pay me seemed absurd,” he said. However, the cost of rent and childcare, which cost “more than I paid for my university education in Canada”, has been hard to swallow.

Sam, 40, lives with his wife and three kids in San Jose, earning around $120,000 a year at a multinational software company. “I get paid a very good wage, but I have three kids, childcare is ridiculously expensive so my wife mostly takes care of them,” he said.
He feels pressure being the sole breadwinner. “I’ve got no safety net,” he said. “I have credit cards, but this is not sustainable. If something bad happened I’d be out of the house in a month.”

Glaring inequality


Fred Sherburn Zimmer from San Francisco’s Housing Rights Committee agreed that housing is too expensive in the Bay Area, but points out that there are much graver consequences for people not working in tech.
“For a senior whose healthcare is down the street, moving might be a death sentence,” she said. “For an immigrant family with two kids, moving out of a sanctuary city like San Francisco means you could get deported.” She described a building in San Francisco where there are 28 people living in “studio-like closets” in a basement, including a senior and families with children.
During the first dotcom boom we had secretaries commuting three hours into work … It’s happening again
A digital marketer in Silicon Valley​
For their part, many well-paid tech workers complaining about their own predicament say they also sympathize with the plight of people on more ordinary incomes.
“We think a lot about how people with normal jobs afford to live here,” said the Canadian IT specialist. “The answer is: they don’t. They commute from farther and farther afield.”
The digital marketer added: “During the first dotcom boom we had secretaries commuting three hours into work … It’s happening again. It was absurd then and it’s absurd now,” she said, adding that she and her husband both “know what it’s like to be poor”.

Sam, who works at the software company, isn’t optimistic about the future. “The only solution I see is a huge reset and we’ve already done that once in the last decade. It was really painful for a lot of people, including myself,” he said, referring to the dotcom crash in the early 2000s.
Some tech workers expressed a sense of guilt about their complaints when so many people are worse off, including San Francisco’s desperate homeless population.
“You are literally stepping over people to get to your job to make hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Michael. “How do you go about your daily life as if it doesn’t matter?”
He suggested venture capitalists should stop investing in “stupid applications” and funnel some money into solving real societal problems like homelessness.
“You are caught in this really uncomfortable position. You feel very guilty seeing such poverty and helplessness,” added Michelle, the 28-year-old on a six-figure wage. “But what are you supposed to do? Not make a lot of money? Not advocate for yourself and then not afford to live here?”
Sam agreed. “The whiny millennial snowflake type would say ‘you’re a terrible person making things worse for us’. The truth is, if I gave up, what would I do? Should I knit sweaters and trade them?”
---

My wife and I live in a 4 bedroom house with a huge backyard and a giant living room that we barely ever use. 2 of our beds are empty and we pay 1/4th of the amount. Based on comparisons in this article, we actually have a better lifestyle making a fifth of the money some of these techs are making in a small town. And we're mostly a single-income family to boot.

I guess we're luckier than we thought.
 
#2 ·
I'm not going to read all that as it's the bay area so of course it's expensive as shit. Why not try going to a different region with less a lower cost of living?


If enough tech workers leave the area, the area will be forced to offer incentives for tech people to work there. It's a win win. :toomanykobes
 
#3 ·
There were a couple of examples of people leaving and taking pay cuts to improve their lifestyle.

The thing that struck me about this article is that sometimes we assume that if you hit the 6 figure mark, you're set for life, but apparently not. It's not something as someone from my generation has been exposed to as I grew up in an era where more money really meant a better lifestyle. But apparently that's changed for you guys.
 
#6 ·
My $500/mo. 1 bedroom a few miles from downtown Cleveland seems pretty damn cushy right now.

I used to want to move to California, because I have family there and vacations were incredible, and I'm a musician so, of course. But what a hassle of a place to live. I don't think I could take it. My sister is there right now paying (well, my dad is paying) $1000 a month for her split of a 3 bedroom in LA.
 
#8 · (Edited)
Sounds like these people didn't do the research before accepting those great job offers too. Most people are probably from around the country where things are affordable and direct from their parents' houses where their parents had decent homes and lifestyles for half the amount they were offered.

Not too many people accept jobs before researching how much it's going to cost them to live in such areas.

That's why while my wife dreams about working in some mega firm after her graduation, I keep reminding her that it's not just her own earnings that she needs to worry about. It's how much she's gonna have to pay as well.

My sister ended up in a similar situation too. She got a job offer in Vancouver. Moved and then realized after the move that she can no longer afford a decent lifestyle there. Her husband makes more money than my wife and she's on welfare now (having lost her job) and living hand-to-mouth in a smaller house than we live in as well.
 
#16 · (Edited)
It begs to question where will they shelve all their homeless and illegals? For such a city of rich "Liberals" they seem to have a lot of issues regarding poverty. I'm sure tax payers wil pay for it all while the rich complain about Trump but bask in tax cuts!


LOL strike at a tech company? There is a reason why tech giants want open boarders and to get cheap labor. Anyone who thinks they won't be replaced is kidding themselves.
 
#12 ·
Wealth is relative to your costs. Magic has the right idea but it's borderline impossible to stage a workers revolt. If you and even 99 other people quit their jobs and move, you'll all just be replaced. Such is the way of non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment belief system, and a country where tens of people graduate for every job opportunity.

Idk about the US but I assume, potentially, the guy and his family that live on $3,000 rent could move about 30-60 minutes away for a cheaper place, but then you have to wonder if travelling 60 more minutes to and from work is worth it.
 
#14 · (Edited)
Idk about the US but I assume, potentially, the guy and his family that live on $3,000 rent could move about 30-60 minutes away for a cheaper place, but then you have to wonder if travelling 60 more minutes to and from work is worth it.
You gotta remember that a lot of these are really young people too who have been pampered by their daddies all their lives - usually small town folk who are brilliant in their respective fields. So they accept their job offers BEFORE looking into housing and other things assuming that everything will be the same as it is in their small little town or mid-city suburb.

... That's sort of the American way of doing things. Apply for a job, move and then look for a home. It should be the other way around. Look at the costs of living first and then apply for a job.

There's that and there's actually a land mafia sort of situation in CA where home owners directly vote on legislation that impacts them. So they always vote for legislation that helps them the most. I read somewhere that a homeowner in CA pays less tax on a $4 million home than he does on a $1 million home in Nebraska.

Yeah, no conflict of interest there :lmao

Funny how San Francisco has the probs the most millionaires but also the most homeless people.
Homeowner lobbyists + Illegal immigration + Sanctuary City. Worst combination possible.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top