I'm tagging my chit chat thread as "Hacker News Rant" since you're one of the few places consisting of people intelligent enough for me to rant on HN crap. So, original article: And discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33036807 And why I can't take it anymore? It's not that I envy US salaries though I do a little. What I can't take anymore is the smugness of HN crowd stating that half a million dollars per year in salary is barely scrapping an existence. Lemme quote the typical comment on a $450k salary: "Yea in absolute terms, you are doing well. However, when you account for everything, the salaries don’t look as ridiculous as it sounds." YES, THEY DO. THEY DO LOOK AS RIDICULOUS AS THEY SOUND. Half a million per year is a pipe dream and 99.9% of the imbeciles on HN making these ridiculous claims are and will be nowhere near it in their entire worthless pathetic lives and I'm not talking 3rd world call center workers, I mean Americans. Yet they propagate the meme. Is it something in the culture that promotes this sort of over the top me-wearing-a-goldchain-coze-imma-millionaire sort of posing? For reference I'm making about €120,000 per year and that's very unusual not for Eastern but for Western Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage I make 12.5x the average salary in my country. My brother works a bit over a year to make what I do in a month. On the other hand with an IQ of 130-150 (depending on the amount of alcohol consumed), got admitted the first at one of the best universities in the country. That is after being rejected at the country's best of the best universities, so I'm not la crème de la crème, only la creme. And conscious about it
If you got to the best Uni in your country you are at the peak given your circumstances. And 12X average salary is what you would expect. I was an Oracle DBA & PL/SQL programmer as well as a UNIX sysadmin at my last job in 2011 before I got fired and I only made $118K and that was after 19 years at the firm (defunct Pharma IT company). Of course I was a C student at UC Berkeley (BA in Chemistry).