I don't know enough to comment on "healthiness" of assumptions about ones' self and where they fit into analysis like in the OP's link. My commentary is purely on how we communicate with each other in a time where divisiveness, misinformation, and polarization are common and pervasive.
It's hard, but if we want to have productive discussions we need to treat each other with empathy and talk to the best possible interpretation of each other's arguments. This assumes people are coming to a dialog in good faith, but everything needs to start with a little trust somewhere. Trolls are also not too hard to spot.
The median salary for software developers in 2019 in the US was $107,000, with 50% between $82,000 and $136,000. The mean salary in California was $134,000 and the mean in San Francisco was $145,000. (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...)
The median household income in the US in 2019 was $69,560 with a 90% confidence interval of <$1000. The "median earnings of all workers aged 15 and over with earnings" in 2019 was $42,065. (FWIW, the median household income for black people in 2020 was $46,000, and for Asian people was $95,000.) The median household income of those with no college education was $47,000, some college was $64,000, and at least a bachelors degree was $107,000. (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...)
(The median household income in California in 2019 was $78,000.)
The median salary for software developers individually in 2019 therefore puts them in the highest 40% of households. (In 2019, 1/5th of households made less than $28,000, 2/5 made less than $54,000, 3/5 made less than $86,000, and 4/5 made less than $143,000. 95% made less than $270,000.)
For many of the people frequenting HN, this is your mileage in the act of varying.
If you want productive discussions that you need to enter them in a good faith.
Building an argument based on personal anecdotes and applying it to national policy not good faith. Science literally exists to limit subjective bias and to separate actual trends in reality from notions in your head, subjective experience basically worthless for understanding large-scale trends.
It's always alarming to me to see how many people on HN don't acknowledge the bubble they're in.
If you're a well-paid engineer, and nearly everyone you interact with is a well-paid engineer, you're going to think everyone lives like you.
And I wonder how many of them grew up poor. And I mean, poor as in "half my meals as a kid were rice and beans", not "One time my dad didn't get the bonus he was expecting, so we had to fly coach rather than First Class when we to France during Christmas".
Questioning the BLS data without being able to explain how the data is collected and analyzed is not a way to fight misinformation, it's a way to encourage it.
If OP had made some more detailed arguments, like 'the methods for imputing homeowners rent seem biased' or 'it seems disingenuous to keep a static weighting during COVID, despite the major observed shift away from services and to goods' then I would love to engage on that.
But randomly saying 'this EXTREMELY transparent dataset seems fishy' is just encouraging people to 'do their own research' on things they have no expertise in.
It's hard, but if we want to have productive discussions we need to treat each other with empathy and talk to the best possible interpretation of each other's arguments. This assumes people are coming to a dialog in good faith, but everything needs to start with a little trust somewhere. Trolls are also not too hard to spot.