Remember also that this is a table of household income, which means that you aren't even included unless you're married. It is seemingly fairly common for engineers to be "late bloomers" romantically and marry late, or not at all. By then, they're frequently in management anyway, and so they'd show up in the "manager" portion of the infographic.
I suspect that roughly 30% of the engineering population at Google is in the 1% (given what I know of salary scales and what fraction of engineers are at each eng level). That works out to maybe 4-5k engineers (assuming half the company is engineering), out of the 6,746 in "Computer & data processing services". You really think that Google accounts for 80% of the 1% in software developers? Where's Facebook and Twitter in there - them alone should push it over the count given?
No - what's happening is that most of those well-paid software engineers are single. Of the ones that aren't, many of them married college sweethearts who work as teachers or yoga instructors or urban planners or other professions that don't make a whole lot of money. One Google senior-SWE total comp will put you in the 1% as a single taxpayer, two of them will put you in the 1% as a household, but one of them plus a teacher's salary will not get you anywhere close to the 1%.
This is actually an interesting question: What fraction of the households in the top 1% are there because they have two salaries in the $150k-$200k range and what fraction are there because they have a single high earner? You're assuming that it's mostly the former, but it's not obvious to me why this should be the case, necessarily. It'd depend on salary distribution within various fields and across fields....
I haven't been able to find good data on individual income, sadly. At least in part because if one uses AGI then all you have to go with are tax returns and if a married couple files jointly the AGI will just be the joint number and that's that. But people also keep claiming this is "household" income, which doesn't quite match AGI in many cases (e.g. married-filing-separately situations, households which consist of taxpayers who are not married to each other, households with more than 2 taxpayers, etc).
I really wish the data-gathering methodology were actually spelled out somewhere. :(
The census data is reported separately - the 1% threshold for singles is $160K, probably skewed lower because they tend to be younger. If the infographic is based off census data, it excludes single-person households.
So if you are a single person making $160K, you are the 1%. If, later, you get married to someone making $30K you become the 99%, even though the paired earnings haven't changed.
I suspect that roughly 30% of the engineering population at Google is in the 1% (given what I know of salary scales and what fraction of engineers are at each eng level). That works out to maybe 4-5k engineers (assuming half the company is engineering), out of the 6,746 in "Computer & data processing services". You really think that Google accounts for 80% of the 1% in software developers? Where's Facebook and Twitter in there - them alone should push it over the count given?
No - what's happening is that most of those well-paid software engineers are single. Of the ones that aren't, many of them married college sweethearts who work as teachers or yoga instructors or urban planners or other professions that don't make a whole lot of money. One Google senior-SWE total comp will put you in the 1% as a single taxpayer, two of them will put you in the 1% as a household, but one of them plus a teacher's salary will not get you anywhere close to the 1%.