What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty

The question is "What is the question?"

- Would you rather be on $24k/p/a in Tijuana?

- Would you rather be in the bottom 10% income bracket in Tijuana?

I work for a major telecom company doing field service.

I'm a contractor, I get a fair wage, but not much else.

Real employees get, company truck, 20% more pay, 100% paid benefits, company phone and a bunch of intangibles.

Like a good example when my manager goes on vacation even though I drive my own vehicle and am paid mileage, none of my mileage requests are paid, right now I'm floating about a month worth of mileage and other expenses, to the tune of 700+ dollars. If I were an employee, I would have a company vehicle, company gas card, company expense card, and it wouldn't be coming out of my pocket.

I never know what to make of these articles. I started out with low pay in Silicon Valley, too; I took a job at a startup in 1999 making $15/hour doing IT desktop support. In 2002 (edit: this was 2002, not 2001), when I quit to do consulting and start my own company, things were miserable in the Valley--and my salary as a developer was still only $49,500/year then.

I am a college dropout. By traditional standards, then, this guy has more than I do: He has a college degree. Working at a tech company, he had to see that the developers/sysadmins/computer folks made more than he did.

I find this juxtaposition interesting because, certainly, a similar article could have been written about me in 1999. $15 an hour was a terrible wage then in the Valley, too.

Faced with something similar, I asked several of the developers at our company to teach me development. They were amused at this young 18-year-old girl asking them what a "for loop" was. But they taught me.

It took me a while to pick up Linux system administration, bash shell scripting, Perl and PHP (this was in 1999-2000.) When I dropped out of school in 2001, my parents cut me off financially, so I shared tiny apartments, slept on couches, and made ends meet.

Now, at age 32, I've bootstrapped a startup to a 7-figure sale and am now the CEO of a funded startup.

For most of my life, I've dealt with depression and believing I was not "good enough." In that way, I empathize with Manny. If he's reading this, I would like to say to him: I stand here as proof that a minority with no college degree and no formal education can make it in this world. You live in Silicon Valley. If you really want to pull yourself out of poverty, all doors can be open to you. The first step is believing that you can do it.

Google hasn't hired anybody. The security company was awarded a contract to provide security services, which is fulfilled by employing some people at "But Google is benefiting from this exploitation!" you might say.

Yes. Google can pay less for security services because the guards ultimately cost less. If the guards worked 40 hours/week, the contract cost would have to increase, and another lower cost security company may have won the contract. The reality is that security services are only worth so much. Not every job (even at full time) can or should be expected to pay a livable wage.

>> costs of compliance for a full-time employee

I'm not sure this is the driver. Instead, the primary factor is likely the fact that hourly employees cost a 50% more the moment they cross 40 hours in a week.

>> Google would rather hire 15 guys at 40-60 hours instead of 40 guys at 20 hours

Not if they are paid hourly, they wouldn't. It would just be throwing money away.

In my way-back days working hourly jobs in retail/fast food/etc., we would game this by trying to get as many excess hours as possible early in the week, so that we could get to 40+ hours by the 5th/6th day. Then, we'd aggressively try to get extra shifts from people who called in sick, etc. But management always tried to prevent this.