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Traditionally class is about wealth and not having to work. By European standards that programmer is quite correct. In Europe class is about wealth and status where the status comes from not needing to do labor. In the US we are far more concerned with income and having a high status profession where the status comes from the work's social importance or implied intellectual capability. So the two systems don't neatly map onto each other.
It seems to me from my limited time in Europe that most people recognize a spectrum of class much more than the US. Possibly because the top classes are not defined by monetary wealth, but by ancestry, titles etc. In Britain, there's constant jokes about how monetarily poor the aristocracy is. They own a county, live in a castle, and wear hand-me-downs from their great-grandparents (is the type of joke I hear from Brits). In the US, because we don't have that stuff officially (we do have an aristocratic upper class, but they play it down and don't flaunt titles), the public perception of class is primarily cash-based. It gets collapsed into "rich, poor, middle class".
It is that perception I am arguing against. I think money is correlated, but not the prime driver of class. Status, access to power, connections etc. are much more important than bank balance in my opinion.
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