In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.
replyIn Atlanta in 2000, I was making $52K a year working for a medium size company that printed bills. By 2002 I was making $65K at the same company.
replyFor context, I had my 2600 square foot 3.5/2 bedroom house built that year for $175K.
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replyThe equivalent of about $20/hr today for those wondering
replyHousing is the ultimate decider so I’d say that’s equivalent to at least 50 bucks today.
replyDamn, never thought about it like that. That seems a lot more practical and relevant than the Big Mac Index.
replyYeah I think housing is the real index. CPI doesn’t make sense for individuals unless you build your own index.
replyI don't understand why. People spend money on other things besides housing. Because people spend money on multiple things, it doesn't really make that much sense to say that our index of inflation should track be one thing. I mean, if the price of food and healthcare tripled, I think you would probably say that the inflation metrics should go up.
replyOfc, focusing on just one thing is very convenient for people who want to tell a particular story. (inflation is so bad! look at housing! there's so much deflation! look at food and TVs!)
It'll never happen because it shines a light on uncomfortable facts that would risk far too much cognitive dissonance across the political spectrum. Please keep the discourse to identity politics, culture wars, the Epstein files, and large-scale, unprovoked acts of international warfare; those will all be much easier for us to talk about as a nation than what we should do about housing prices.
replyHousing (which is actually land in the school district you want to be in)
replyHealthcare
Education (not just for learning, but for signaling).
Everything else is inconsequential in my budget.
Not even close, not when all things are considered. $50/hour is 100k/year, which is still considered a decent salary. 24k/year in 2000-2002 was definitely not considered a decent salary. $12/hour for sw engineers was evil. I hung up on that recruiter and cursed for a while, cold-called my way to a transitional $20/hr job, and then finally landed somewhere at $55/hr which is when things started to feel normal again. $55/hr back then is not the same as $230/hr now.
replyI think when you go up from 55 to 230 it is different from 12 to 50. But yeah, somehow I thought that was 20, not 12...
replyI started my career at $14/hr in 1999, was at $19/hr in 2000, and switched to salary at $55k by 2001. I spent 15 years in corp IT running software teams... total comp got way better when I entered the big tech industry in 2015.
replyI was working in 2000 in Atlanta GA at boring old enterprises companies with 4 years of experience back then. If you were working for/targeting profitable non tech companies, the world was your oyster.
replyI was working at a company that printed bills for utility companies and had offers from banks, insurance companies etc. The world didn’t stop buying Coca Cola, flying Delta or stop buying stuff from Home Depot because of the dot com crash
Remember that the 2000 numbers are also out of a much smaller pool and the graph uses absolute numbers. So even if they were the same numbers in 2000 as 2020 it would have been a much, much larger percentage of all jobs.
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