Almost all receive their compensation in the form of a base salary. However, more “high level” software engineers will also be paid in equity of some sort, effectively owning part of the company and having some stake in it
This seems like a weird middle ground. Is there a more definitive definition of what a working class person is?
See also The GNU Manifesto
Answer 1
We are workers, but members of the labor aristocracy. It's a well established phenomenon of imperialist countries, particularly for skilled workers, that far predates the tech industry. From the wiki:
In Marxist theory, those workers (proletarians) in the developed countries who benefit from the superprofits extracted from the impoverished workers of developing countries form an "aristocracy of labor". The phrase was popularized by Karl Kautsky in 1901 and theorized by Vladimir Lenin in his treatise Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. According to Lenin, companies in the developed world exploit workers in the developing world where wages are much lower.
The increased profits enable these companies to pay higher wages to their employees "at home" (that is, in the developed world), thus creating a working class satisfied with their standard of living and not inclined to proletarian revolution. It is a form of exporting poverty, creating an "exclave" of lower social class. Lenin contended that imperialism had prevented increasing class polarization in the developed world and argued that a workers' revolution could only begin in one of the developing countries, such as Russia.
Answer 2
Yes, SEs are working class.
I'm one of those people. I want to share with you an experience I've had.
Many years ago, I was working at a startup as a Software Engineer. As you described, my compensation was in the form of combined salary + equity.
It was a great job. We had a small team of very talented engineers who worked together wonderfully. The work itself was interesting and exciting, and our product had tons of room for growth, both in the market and in regards to technical work.
A few years after I joined the company, the CEO sold the company to one of our competitors.
No one on the engineering team wanted this, but our opinions didn't need to be considered. We were being thrown from a team of 5 engineers to a company with 5,000 engineers, into a company with different technology preferences/stacks, and with mountains of legal red tape that were suddenly going to be part of our day-to-day.
But hey, we had equity. So at least we were going to get a hefty payment to dry our tears with, as that equity was immediately transformed into cold-hard-cash.
Each engineer received a lump sum in the 10s of thousands.
The CEO, CFO, and COO each received lump sums in the 10s of millions.
Those three C-level individuals retired in their early 30s. I bought myself a new car to replace my 15-year-old toyota and had to find a new job.