When a business that's in financial distress doesn't pay their workers in favour of some other corporate goal, we call that "wage theft". You shouldn't be advocating wage theft
80K/year is what I made as a junior software engineer in a seed stage startup back in 2015. I'll tell you right now that it was barely enough to:
- live in a crappy studio in what some people call a "sketchy" part of SF and
- be able to have some savings and not have to worry every time I went grocery shopping.
I made do because I lived alone but after a certain point I had to go elsewhere with roomates otherwise I would have had to stay in that crappy studio where I was regularly seeing bugs in the bathroom and kitchen cupboards.
Anyway, anyone calling that kind of salary "silicon valley salary" for the kind of experience @staff has doesn't know shit from fuck and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. Go look at what a 8+ years of experience software engineer gets at companies like Google, Facebook or any publicly traded company and think about it for more than 2 sec because you went "5 figures == rich".
For the work that staff does and the sector that they work in, 80k is modest. COLAs are also bog-fucking-standard. For a group that's supposedly invested in improving the material conditions of the working class, a lot of people on this site don't seem interested in actually doing that.
