Consdier any family of two engineers in silicon valley. If they graduated from college and joined successful companies, after a decade or so they will be making over 150k each, for a family income of 300k.
But yet they still work 50+ hours a week each, maybe 60 if they are checking email at nights and on the weekends. How have their lives changed between the interview and now? Not much. Meals are still prepared at home or work. Weekends most likely still mean riding bike or going to a movie. Any talk of family causes worry about taking time away from the career or delaying their hopes to be founders. Vacations disrupt work schedules, and the catching up afterward cause more headache then they are worth.
This level of wealth is different than what we hear about from the days of robber barons or Mad Men. Its even different than what anyone images when they prepare for undergraduate school. There is no luxury lifestyle with a condo downtown and home in the country. There are no two hour martini lunches. There are no personal chefs or nannies. You don't spend more time in leisure than at work. You always spend more of your time doing something you wish you could delegate, but you do it because you know it has to get done.
And maybe that is because wealth is very transient in tech. In five years your 100k+ job could be just as easily gone as become a 200k job. But more likely I would think that in tech high income comes with higher responsibilities. More wealth means more work, not less. And that is not about to change.
Perhaps this is the same in all sectors consistently creating new wealth; bio, pharma, engineering and tech. If so I think it is not surprising to see that families in the 200-500k range don't think they're wealthy when their current income level crosses a certain mark, because it has little immediate, and maybe little permanent, affect.
I think the people in the 250k range are having a philosophical argument about what it means to be wealthy. And the working class are arguing numbers.
I get it. They can have a decent income and not live a "rich" lifestyle, but they probably have a house, investments, kids in nice schools, they probably travel, eat at nice restaurants, etc. It's not wealthy, but they're not broke. I think that was the idea of a progressive tax. It increases as you move up the ladder. We're all debating the cutoff point.
My thesis was the opposite of your statement; those at the cut-off point are not travelling, they are not eating a nice restaurants, and they do not have kids let alone kids in good schools. They are working longer and harder than they did at the beginning of their career, and hence do not have a feeling of having obtained wealth.
To restate, I posit that while they have recently acquired a high income; with that has not come wealth in any sense that has made an impact on their lifestyle.
Concretely, having a 30 year mortgage on a 1500 foot house isn't a significant change from a 900 sq ft apartment. A 6% pay decrease for a 401k account might not be noticable, but when an investment can't be touched for 29 years there isn't a feeling of wealth attached to it.
I would assume that 10 years at this salary level may change that, but with the transient nature of tech this is not something that it assumed by most. I am also working under the assumption that that the distribution of people with earnings in this range is skewed towards those having reached it within the last decade.
But yet they still work 50+ hours a week each, maybe 60 if they are checking email at nights and on the weekends. How have their lives changed between the interview and now? Not much. Meals are still prepared at home or work. Weekends most likely still mean riding bike or going to a movie. Any talk of family causes worry about taking time away from the career or delaying their hopes to be founders. Vacations disrupt work schedules, and the catching up afterward cause more headache then they are worth.
This level of wealth is different than what we hear about from the days of robber barons or Mad Men. Its even different than what anyone images when they prepare for undergraduate school. There is no luxury lifestyle with a condo downtown and home in the country. There are no two hour martini lunches. There are no personal chefs or nannies. You don't spend more time in leisure than at work. You always spend more of your time doing something you wish you could delegate, but you do it because you know it has to get done.
And maybe that is because wealth is very transient in tech. In five years your 100k+ job could be just as easily gone as become a 200k job. But more likely I would think that in tech high income comes with higher responsibilities. More wealth means more work, not less. And that is not about to change.
Perhaps this is the same in all sectors consistently creating new wealth; bio, pharma, engineering and tech. If so I think it is not surprising to see that families in the 200-500k range don't think they're wealthy when their current income level crosses a certain mark, because it has little immediate, and maybe little permanent, affect.