The problem is you're exposing yourself as someone extremely self-centered, and someone that assumes their lived experience is equivalent of everyone else's, and adjudicating the utility of this particular thing as if you are reflective of the larger population.
Saying the majority of engineers in California make at least $200k makes you even more out of touch. According to Glassdoor, over $200k for a SE in CA is 90th percentile. The average SE in CA makes $132,000
>The problem is you're exposing yourself as someone extremely self-centered, and someone that assumes their lived experience is equivalent of everyone else's, and adjudicating the utility of this particular thing as if you are reflective of the larger population.
Most of Hacker News and indeed the tech community at large exhibit "I don't understand life outside of California cities." syndrome, this by itself is nothing new.
>make at least $200k makes you even more out of touch.
$200K as the entry level for FANNG ( what it used to be call ), and then Big Tech and now Magnificent 7 has been the norm on HN since 2016. It wasn't until 2023 did reality started to hit many.
Use Levels, but change the location to the other big cities in California. The LA number is ~$80k lower than the SF number, while the Fresno average is $120k. The SF area is a wild outlier even in big California metros.
Sorry, but they're far more representative than levels.fyi. The latter has a very strong sampling bias - most of the companies in its DB are on the high end of the payscale.
Your suggestion that we don't / shouldn't care about anything other than ourselves is more than a little insulting, whether you intended that or not.
In any case, like the root of this comment tree says, the best way to make sure this program lives to reach us is to make sure it paces itself. If that means another year or two of TurboTax, that's A-OK!
They are still a tiny minority. I mean HNers from everwhere from Wyoming to Germany and Brazil.
One of the best ideas the Reagan administration had was paperwork simplification, they introduced a 1040EZ for (roughly) the same kind of filer that Direct File works for.
My son put off paying his 2023 taxes to the last minute, I told him he should try Direct File (I'd believed the story that it would be easy) but when he tried it he had extreme difficulty authenticating himself, I think because they check you against consumer databases and they could not compare to past tax returns, credit history, etc. because this was his first tax return and he had no credit history.
We were forced to wait for a long time to talk to a human operator for him to verify his id. In that time I found out that there was no longer a 1040EZ, see
but I was able to fill out a complete 1040 and the New York equivalent of it before we got through to the operator. We just got the check from New York the other day after about 6 weeks, haven't heard from the IRS yet.
