My argument has always been that they exist in the middle class. The fact that median income being low isn't indicative of them not being middle class, but rather that the continued squeeze on salary among all middle class workers has resulted in a shrinking of who actually is middle class and what that income means.
> Sites like what you share are often going to be representative of the upper band of the salary range since that's who self-reports
Many people have corroborated that levels.fyi is accurate for large tech companies like Amazon and Google. It's accurate for my company as well.
If FAANG comp is middle class, at what point does it become upper middle/upper class? I believe ~$500k is 1% income in the US. Some SWEs who are "workers" break that. Is someone who has top 1% income really middle class?
A lot of SWEs also receive equity compensation (I.e. ownership), which is very much not a middle class phenomenon.
The point is that salaries should have increased for everyone. Middle class is not struggling to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck. It is living a modest life with modest savings and a discretionary income.
This random article claims the 90th percentile in the Bay Area is $384K. https://www.kqed.org/news/11799308/bay-area-has-highest-inco...
I am not sure how that helps make this clearer though. It almost doesn’t matter at this point. We all know making $55K/yr in the Bay Area is rough. People are getting screwed over.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
In your CNBC article everything is based on household income. Many SWEs would be classed as not middle class based on their own income let alone household income.
The median SWE salary in the US is $110k: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/....
If you take increased salary due to location and partner salary into account, the majority of SWEs are easily upper middle class.
> In places like San Francisco where the cost of living is significantly higher, you would need to be earning ~230k a year to be in the upper middle class
A solo entry level FAANG engineer basically qualifies for upper middle class. Add a partner and you're definitely upper middle class.
> And even with FAANG the salary between an engineer at Amazon and one at Google is going to vastly differ, especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at
What are you talking about with "especially depending on what part of Amazon you're working at"? As far as I've seen Retail vs AWS doesn't have different comp.
Google and Amazon also have pretty similar comp: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Amazon&track=Software....
Their comp bands likely have a lot of overlap. Differences are more likely to be based on negotiation than working for Google vs Amazon.