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I have a snarky Freudian theory that the rise of the tech right and a lot of SV comms missteps have the same root cause - that the founder/VC elite are failing to contain their white-hot rage at having to pay upper-middle class salaries (and extend the respect the upper class traditionally extends to the upper-middle class) to mere codemonkeys who lack upper-middle class social graces.
In this model, the "permanent generational underclass" meme is founders, VCs, and people who see themselves as future founders and VCs expressing glee at the codemonkeys losing undeserved social status. From the point of view of someone who can afford a family-sized house in the Bay Area, nurses, plumbers etc. are already part of the underclass.
If that was the issue for them they’d have fired all the expensive American software engineers making $300k years ago and replaced them with French, British and Germans making a quarter or a third of that.
I think both sides of the culture war agree that the Valley did try to do this, but with Indians instead of Europeans. They disagree on whether or not it succeeded, and whether or not it would be a good thing if it did.
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They tried. Didn't work. The French, British, and Germans at home weren't good substitutes, and the ones who came to the US demanded the $300k.
But I would have pegged you (along with BC) as one of most likely to be experiencing that white-hot rage at the wrong people making the big bucks.
I think nobody deserves to make one cent less than the amount they can fairly negotiate. IQ and demographics do not indicate a great superiority for American tech workers. US companies achieved dominant global positions because of larger domestic markets, far more readily available capital, network effects and superior entrepreneurial culture. But none of these suggest US engineers are far better or smarter than their European peers. That would be unlikely.
The pay is likely load-bearing for the engineers just as it is for the founders. Pay a top engineer a normal middle class salary, and you'll get good, solid work out of them. Give them a chance to get rich and you'll likely get a lot more.
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What is the downside to just throwing all these people off a cliff again? I'm actually asking.
The right-wing misanthropic VCs, the no-longer-needed codemonkeys, or the plumbers? Tossing any of the three is a plausible sentiment for at least one Motteposter to hold.
But if, as I suspect, you mean why can't we throw Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen off a cliff, the answer is that Musk is too valuable to the work of society given that he can build space rockets 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else. Andreessen, on the other hand...
Why would anyone wanna throw the plumbers off a cliff? I’m not trying to be dense here that just seems like a weird group of people to be angry at.
Childhood trauma from Super Mario?
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In the UK, because too many of them are Polish.
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It's not that weird for committed shitlibs. Union plumbers are ultramaga republicans.
Granted we don't have a lot of people on the motte that want to clear out all the magats on the grounds that if they can do it we can do without it. But the bluesky crowd being horrified at the politics of the experts at keeping their lights on and their water running is a semi-regular occurrence.
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Marc Andressen was the first person to come to mind when I wrote my response to the OP. The guy was born to middle-class parents in Iowa and raised in Wisconsin. He was himself a computer programmer. He's not the kind of elitist described. (Also you can't throw him off a cliff because the man is huge.)
It's been a very long time since Andressen was checking in code. It is obvious from reading e.g. Paul Graham's essays that VCs and successful founders see themselves as a different kind of person to top technical talent (tl;dr - Altman said that James Bond was fundable but Q would not be) - and the things that Paul Graham is saying are conventional wisdom in the valley. My impression is that both founders/VCs and top technical talent see the gap between top technical talent and mid-tier technical talent as so large that the average FAANG Senior is closer to QA and HR than to themselves.
My take is that Andressen is one of the main people pushing the theory (which I think originated with Musk) that FAANG were roughly 2x overstaffed and that this was a bad thing because they were outbidding startups for talent. I remember him tweeting "Nature heals itself" in response to a post about tech layoffs and coming to the conclusion that he resented his (indirect via portfolio companies) employees.
I will admit to also disliking Andressen because a16z seems to be disproportionately likely to invest in ethically dubious startups like crypto scams, Adam Neumann's Flow and the AI "cheating" app Cluely.
I (a former FAANG engineer) would agree with him that founders are different sorts of people than top technical talent; at least most of them are. (Steve Wozniak is one obvious exception: it was Jobs who had the non-technical talent in spades). And that Google, at least, is ridiculously overstaffed. That's different than resenting "code monkeys" making a lot of money; wanting technical talent to be available to startups is valuing them highly, not considering them lower organisms of some sort. It might be better for the engineers to phone it in and collect a paycheck on the latest obviously-doomed FAANG project rather than bust their butt at a startup, but Andressen's desire for them to do the latter is based on greed, not resentment.
There is a fairly common pattern (Jobs-Wozniak may be the ur-example) of a pair of cofounders where one is the "founder type" and the other is top technical talent. My read of Valley culture is that given the chance they will (as mostly happened in the case of Apple) try to retcon the pair as solo founder and employee number one.
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Huge as in obese or jacked?
I’ve only seen pics or interviews of him sitting or from the waist up. From what I could tell he always came across as a pudgy short computer nerd type. With a head shaped exactly like an egg.
I think he's like 6-7.
Okay actually an in inch or two shorter but still a giant.
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Which people? There's a lot of groups mentioned there. The least valuable are probably "people who see themselves as future founders" (yeah, yeah, ideas are a dime a dozen)... and the people who have that rage. Who I don't think are actually SV founders and VCs; while some are traditional business types, and a few even have multi-generational money, most are noveau-riche just like the "code monkeys" they're paying. They may not like paying them, but that's pretty much for financial reasons. There are definitely those who hate that gauche technical people get paid big, but it's not that group.
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