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Comment by bobwaycott | Hacker News Reader

Can you provide a walkthrough scenario or two that really explicates what this would look like in practice?

A programmer is a member of a 'guild', where he/she draws a monthly income. A business needs some sales/biz dev automation done. The usual approach is to either hire someone or contract out the work, what I propose instead is that the business puts out specific outcomes that they want with a monetary value.

For example; we will pay x amount per customer who stays for 3 years and we spend only time(t) per week servicing this customer. The benefit here is,instead of maybe just creating a DB and automating invoice collection(which are just features and piecemeal work) the programmer and business are forced to look at the totality of biz operations and explicitly state the cost and value of each action, step and procedure.This way a programmer can directly identify the value that they created from cost savings or higher billings. To me the 'Xprize' is about specific successes and outcomes.Even if these outcomes may take time to be seen, the programmer is earning an income from the guild and the business pays up for actual value when it is experienced.

X Prizes (and their ilk) are great, but they have limited application. So much of what developers do is not directly measurable. For example, how do you measure the value of a scalable, modular, and extensible platform that will serve as a basis for growth over the next 5-10 years? By only rewarding what you can measure now, you risk running up a lot of technical debt in pursuit of those metrics.

" For example, how do you measure the value of a scalable, modular, and extensible platform that will serve as a basis for growth over the next 5-10 years?" your questions provides evidence of why I would prefer a wage free environment. As it currently stands now, a business will pay you an upfront fee to develop this platform, and earn most of the profit for the next ten years. I would rather earn a royalty from my platform in all these ten years( this sorts out the technical debt issue).

Again this is not about worker Vs business, it is about what arrangement makes more money for everyone especially from the business perspective, and are incentives aligned.

That's sort of how startups work, with equity grants to early employees. What you are proposing for larger businesses is simply impractical and so inconsistent with the current state of affairs that it really has no chance. To succeed, you're going to have to fundamentally shift our business culture. I see the ideal that you are striving for, but I can't fathom a path to get there from here.

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