The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.
The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.
Engineering is always boom/bust. Ask a retired aerospace engineer who got purged in the 90s.
Technology always automates jobs away. I had a dedicated database systems team 25 years ago that was larger than an infrastructure team managing 1000x more stuff today. Dev teams are bloated in most places, today.
Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.
This is an interesting perspective, and I assume your definition is the technically correct one. Still, many SEs receive substantial compensation in RSUs, direct stocks, shares in startups, et cetera. So also from this perspective, there are many non-working class SEs. Another aspect is that culturally, the perception has been that SEs don't necessarily sell their work by the hour, but instead sell knowledge that scales tremendously, in exchange for a comfortable upper middle-to-lower upper class life.
To be technical, and to borrow a bit. Proletariat[1] are the working class, they work for the Bourgeoisie[2], the people who own the means of productions. That's why I asked why you used demote. Lower, Middle and Upper are strata or ranks within classes. Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish:
Petite bourgeoisie: small business owners, shopkeepers
Haute bourgeoisie: industrialists, financiers
Managerial class (in some frameworks): high-paid non owners who control labor
Within the proletariat, you can distinguish:
Lumpenproletariat[3]: unemployed, precarious
Skilled laborers vs unskilled laborers
Labor aristocracy: better-paid, sometimes ideologically closer to capital
The distinction here is "do you get your money from owning assets or do you get your money from working" because where you get your money is where you get your incentives and the incentives of owning are opposite the incentives of working in many important regards.
The economy is inhabited by people who work for a living but it is controlled by people who own things for a living. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's the definition of capitalism. If you do not own things for a living and do not know people who do, spend some time pondering "the control plane." It should seem like an alien world at first, but it's an alien world with a wildly outsize impact on your life and it behooves you to understand it in broad strokes even if you aren't trying to climb into it.
I wouldn’t say the economy is “controlled” by those people. The economy is just an emergent phenomenon. It’s a natural result of unrestricted freedom of exchange.
Something I've always puzzled over is whether the means of production are our laptops, or our knowledge and expertise. I still work for a wage, but expect to be paid above subsistence. I don't own the laptop that I use at work, but also don't own the carpeting on the floor. Both are commodities.
Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or both?
For factory workers, the means of production is the factory.
What’s “the factory” for software? Our equivalent of the factory is the organization we work in, and our connection to the people who turn our software into money.
You can write software at home by yourself, just like you can do machining on your own. But there are a lot of steps between making software, or machining, and turning that output into money. By working for a company, you can have other people handle those steps. The tradeoff is that this structure is something owned by someone else.
The means of production are the software you produce, the servers they run on, and the patents, proprietary data, algorithms, and other intellectual property that are the byproduct of your labor.
This might be the definition in Marxist theory but in normal colloquial language “working class” absolutely does not mean the same thing as “anyone who doesn’t own the means of production”. But I think you know what OP meant and are just derailing the conversation.
The means of production for a software engineer is a laptop. Many SEs own them. There are no raw materials or factories needed to produce software, at least not in the sense of traditional production.
That’s not true. The actual means of production are the data centers. It’s true they didn’t use to be hugely expensive either, but now with AI being the backbone of everything we now have really expensive data centers again.
if we're just going to loop this properly, the modern means of production is the stock market's inflated capital. Most of AI floats on cash that does not exist for any purpose except market speculation.
The means of producing an AI is a huge data centre for training. Having a lot of money but no chips of any kind wouldn't get you an AI. We had money 10 years ago, but they did not make AIs out of them.
You could say the same thing of hands. What really distinguishes capital from labor is not what counts as a tool, but market power. A large number of non-unionized workers are inherently at a disadvantage against a small number of employers with exorbitantly costly infra.
The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.
That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.)
American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class.
This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.
Whose tradition? Not the American working class. Despite the strong labor unions extent I think you'd be hard pressed to find marxists among them. We talk of middle and upper class precisely because we don't ascribe to the "traditional" framing of bourgeoisie v. proletariat, because running a business is actually work too, even if you own the capital. If you sit around and spend money all day we just call you an aristocrat.
It doesn't, because a lot of those people do not sell their labor. Doctors sell a practice, or can anyway. As time goes on fewer and fewer do - they're being pushed out of the capitalist class to the working class. Most now work a salary for a large employer, like you or me.
I guess it depends on whose tradition is under discussion. In the contemporary American usage, "working class" means the trades, or factory and service work. Few people would call a physician or lawyer "working class" even though they are paid for their time (and knowledge).
I wonder about your contemporaries. I imagine that most of them have a completely different definition to you, because you and doctors and lawyers are - to a rounding error - working class and everyone but you is aware of it.
As someone who used to be in the actual working class (plastic factory), it's not the same at all. Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) covers the autonomy and good treatment the working class can't have. Plus just talk to them.
Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.
Most professional economists IMHO would not agree that Marxism's vocabulary permeates their field.
Core economic concepts are things like elasticity of demand, market equilibrium, externality, market failure, network effect, opportunity cost and comparative advantage, and AFAIK Marx and his follower had essentially no role in explaining or introducing any of those.
Please list terms in this different terminology that are equivalents or analogs of the terms I listed, so that I can use Ctrl+F to find them in my PDF of volume one of the book.
Here's deepseek's answer. To Deepseek I add: Market failure is addressed even more in Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" which addresses market and financial consolidation in the early 20th century (it's worse now). I would also add that Marx built off of and sometimes critiqued Adam Smith and Ricardo, it's not an entirely different branch of the intellectual tree.
Elasticity of Demand – Marx does not explicitly discuss elasticity, but he analyzes demand fluctuations in terms of "the social need" (gesellschaftliche Bedürfnis) and "effective demand" under capitalism (Capital, Vol. III). He notes how capitalist production responds to demand shifts, though not in the formalized neoclassical sense.
Market Equilibrium – Marx critiques the idea of equilibrium (a key concept in classical and neoclassical economics), instead emphasizing "anarchy of production" and "tendential laws" (e.g., the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). He sees markets as inherently unstable due to contradictions in capitalism (Capital, Vol. I & III).
Externality – While Marx doesn’t use this term, he discusses "social costs of production" (e.g., environmental degradation, worker exploitation) as inherent to capitalism’s drive for profit (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "metabolic rift" (in Capital, Vol. III and his ecological writings) touches on unintended consequences akin to negative externalities.
Market Failure – Marx’s entire critique of capitalism can be seen as an analysis of systemic "failures," such as "crises of overproduction", "underconsumption", and "disproportionality" between sectors (Capital, Vol. II & III). He attributes these to contradictions in the capitalist mode of production rather than isolated market inefficiencies.
Network Effect – Marx does not discuss this directly, but his analysis of "general social labor" (the socially necessary labor time underpinning exchange) and the role of "commodity fetishism" (Capital, Vol. I) implies that value is socially determined in a way that could loosely parallel network effects (e.g., the more a commodity is exchanged, the more its value appears natural).
Opportunity Cost – Marx does not use this term (rooted in marginalist economics), but his labor theory of value centers on "socially necessary labor time", implying that the cost of producing one good is the labor diverted from other uses (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "alternative employments of capital" in Capital, Vol. III also touches on trade-offs.
Comparative Advantage – Marx critiques David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage (e.g., in Theories of Surplus Value), arguing that international trade under capitalism exploits unequal exchange and reinforces imperialism. He focuses on "uneven development" and "super-exploitation" rather than mutual gains from trade.
Marx builds on Adam Smith and Ricardo among others and contributes an understanding of where money comes from and where profits come from among other things.
Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of:
A) a worker at Walmart
B) Mark Zuckerberg?
> Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class.
That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.
This feels like the wrong question to ask. Someone with a net worth of a "mere" $2 million is also closer to the coal miner, but at a 3% per year withdrawal rate, has a passive income equal to the coal miner's full time work week without lifting a finger.
I don't think it makes sense to group the "don't have to go to work anymore" people with the "can buy anything" people, but they don't have a lot in common with the working class, either.
To what extent are SWEs working class? I guess that depends on how many of them still have to go to work. A salary of $350k certainly puts you on the road to never having to work again.
A teacher out of union is still as much working class as is a teacher in a union. We software engineers are working class because we have to work for our money.
Do you own businesses, land, investments, and other forms of capital that generate wealth independently of direct labor? Enough wealth so you don't have to work for the foreseeable future? Is this the average software engineer for you (in or out of a union)? Because that's the definition of NOT being a part of the working class.
They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union. Most importantly more protections.
Comparing those in unions who are more likely to be in the video game making or industry or government to faangs like Amazon where you work day and night for a 4 year vesting offer that pays out very little until the 4th year and where on average most worker work less than 2 years at Amazon.
I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound.
Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.
Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.
Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here.
When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker.
If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour.
Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary).
If you have under that threshold (in a big expensive US city), you are probably still working class.
A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30 years depending on pay and savings rate. But also a lot of software engineers operate their budgets almost paycheck-to-paycheck, and will never get there.
> A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30
$5-$10M for 30 years, but only if you save every penny in between? Wow, that's very impressive and totally life-changing! Reminds me of the story how millennials are not able to afford buying a house because of avocado toast!
I don’t see how something like 160-320k income without working is a “modest life”. By any absolute standard you have it better than almost every human that has ever lived.
The caveat is stated above: in a large expensive US city where a lot of these high paying tech jobs are.
Over 50% of that $160k floor is eaten up by just housing and private or ACA insurance.
So your housing costs for like a 1k-2k sqft spot, all in (rent, or if owning then insurance, upkeep, etc) costs you something like $50k+, your health insurance for two people on ACA costs you like $40k yr assuming kids are out of the picture (more if not), and you have a decent chunk leftover to spend on living a decent life, but not like egregiously large amounts. You're not flying first class, probably not taking more than 2 big vacations a year, driving nice but not crazy expensive car, etc.
If you elect to leave the big expensive US city, then of course you can do it with substantially lower amounts (especially so long as you can swing ACA subsidies and are willing to risk your "not-working-class" existence on the whims of the govt continuing that program).
Obviously if you live in some place (read: everywhere except the US?) where the floor for medical costs of two people not working but still having income from capital isn't around $40k/yr, then the amount can go wayyyy down.
> I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound
Oh, really? Is that why both "white-collar worker" and "blue-collar worker" contain the word "worker"? Working class is everyone who has to work for their money. Can most programmers, on a whim, afford to never work again? An average programmer's salary is 2x the average coal miner's. A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/.
Programmers are just one prolonged sickness or medical debt away from being destitute, the same as every other member of the working class. Lawyers, teachers, doctors, programmers, those are all working class, along with agriculture, mining, utilities and all people who have to get up and work for their daily bread and a roof over their head. Sure, there is a discrepancy in pay, but it's not as glaring as it is between a worker and the oligarchs like Trump and Elon Musk. The biggest con in society is that you are so far distanced from the obscene wealth of the rich, that it's not in your face to see how little you have and how much they do.
Both the guy in an old Dodge and the guy in the new Tesla are stuck in traffic, and you fail to realize realize there are people out there right now flying on a private jet for a cocktail? You think the guy living in an apartment is so much different than a guy living in a house in suburbia? How about the guy whose real-estate company bought the whole development and now is cranking up prices?
You make $200k yearly as a welder? Still working class.
You own a small business with 10 workers working for you? Still working class.
You manage a team of devs in a FAANG and are doing alright for yourself? Still working class.
Your parents donated a wing to Yale and own a hotel chain? Not working class.
Your savings account and stocks generate enough for you that you never have to work again? You are not working class.
This is because wealth wise, you are still closer to how much an unemployed person on benefits than to a CEO of a multinational company, and that's a fact.
The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.
So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.
You just choose to spend all your money on things you don't need to survive, that's the only reason you needed to work. But that doesn't make you a worker class any more than Elon Musk becomes a worker class by buying 10 companies like Twitter.
So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."
> The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.
I also like making random numbers up. Here are other numbers. 420. 1337. 1911.
> So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.
I have no words to express how weak this argument is. The US has MOSTLY working class people because less and less people can survive on their salaries.
> So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."
I am not sure if this sentence is a troll, or comes from genuine misunderstanding. I don't know what to advice. I genuinely chuckled. Here are a three numbers, elementary math:
7.25
53
1 600 000
Which two of these numbers are closer to one another? 7.25 and 53, right (I hope)? Well, let's look what those numbers mean:
Non-founder (i.e. external hire) CEOs and other corporate executives also have to work for their money, therefore they are working class. The definition may be technically correct (the best kind of correct) but it is useless.
("A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.)
Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.
> A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.
"In 2022, it was estimated that the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 344.3 in the United States. This indicates that, on average, CEOs received more than 344 times the annual average salary of production and nonsupervisory workers in the key industry of their firm."
> Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.
You can wager whatever you want, but statistically you'd be wrong.
Dude, your own link https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/ says "We focus on the average compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. firms (firms that sell stock on the open market) by revenue."
These 350 largest publicly owned US firms employ a major portion of the US population. Just the top 10 companies by revenue employ 6% of the US work-eligible population. Imagine the total 350 companies!
So, while 350 seems to be a small number, these 350 companies employ the largest chunk of the US market, and that's why they are the most representative to do the study with.
And that's my point! If you select a random worker in the US, there is a HUGE chance they are employed by Amazon, Walmert or one of the big-s. And there is a HUGE chance their salary is 339 times less than their CEO's.
"One medical debt away from being destitute" is socialists trying to make common cause between the upper and lower class. We have great insurance and big piles of savings, there's nothing in common with people who can barely afford their deductible and lose their job for missing too much work.
The boundary between working class and not working class is not at the 99th percentile where you would have it. The diminishing marginal utility of money means you get 90% of the security of being wealthy at 0.1% of the net worth of a billionaire.
> We have great insurance and big piles of savings, there's nothing in common with people who can barely afford their deductible and lose their job for missing too much work.
Between 30 and 70% of Americans can't make ends meet. What used to be called "middle class" is disappearing, making way to only 1%-ers and us, the rest. The fact that I drive a Tesla and some guy drives a Dodge, doesn't mean we are not both stuck in traffic while there is some shcmuck flying on their private jet to reach their yacht.
And for all of Mark Zuckerberg's wealth and property holdings, it wasn't enough and didn't stop him from trying to take sacred land from native Hawaiians on the island of Kauai.
Yeah, I don't see any real difference between "Shut up and take it or we'll outsource your job overseas," which they've been saying since the 90s, and "Shut up and take it or we'll replace you with AI." Same threat, same motives.
