Your definition of rich isn't really something I can argue with. But I would encourage you to take a look at salaries for various jobs in high paid areas, and use that as the bases for comparison. One source I've used is US News Best Jobs.
The median salary for an application developer in San Jose is 116k. For a registered nurse in San Jose, it is 122K. Dental hygienists in San Francisco earn about 109k a year (median), developers in SF, about 110K. Lawyers and Physicians, of course, earn considerably more.
Devs do alright by standards of skilled workers, but they're not really outliers. The widely held notion that devs are wildly overpaid and privileged workers has to go down as one of the great victories of silicon valley PR.
Now, I will agree that tech has create these salaries on a scale that didn't exist before, which may be part of why the resentment occurs. Dental hygienists at 109k a year simply can't exist in numbers sufficient to cause displacement, because they draw their salaries largely from the local population. That limits the ratio. Tech, on the other hand, sells outside the region, so 100k+ salaried tech workers really aren't limited in number by a local population they serve (and they can remain aloof or detached from that population). Again, I'm not saying this is bad (or good), I'm just suggesting it as one possible explanation for why people resent tech salaries so much more than dental hygienist salaries.
Sure, and what I'm saying is that resenting professionals like tech workers is like a guy with a single slice of bread resenting any guy who manages to get two slices of bread whilst completely ignoring that the root problem is another guy down the street with an entire truck full of loaves of bread whose hoarding created the bread shortage in the first place.
And IMO that's exactly how the guy with the truck prefers you think. Or to quote Stewie Griffin: "Dance! Puppets! Dance!"
The median salary for an application developer in San Jose is 116k. For a registered nurse in San Jose, it is 122K. Dental hygienists in San Francisco earn about 109k a year (median), developers in SF, about 110K. Lawyers and Physicians, of course, earn considerably more.
Devs do alright by standards of skilled workers, but they're not really outliers. The widely held notion that devs are wildly overpaid and privileged workers has to go down as one of the great victories of silicon valley PR.
Now, I will agree that tech has create these salaries on a scale that didn't exist before, which may be part of why the resentment occurs. Dental hygienists at 109k a year simply can't exist in numbers sufficient to cause displacement, because they draw their salaries largely from the local population. That limits the ratio. Tech, on the other hand, sells outside the region, so 100k+ salaried tech workers really aren't limited in number by a local population they serve (and they can remain aloof or detached from that population). Again, I'm not saying this is bad (or good), I'm just suggesting it as one possible explanation for why people resent tech salaries so much more than dental hygienist salaries.