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Comment by teraku | Hacker News Reader

What I find really concerning is that all of this is man-made.

So we have management who wants to maximize profits. I don't really blame them, it's a lot of money involved and a shark tank environment. (I mean I do blame them, but I can see their reasoning). But then we have engineers who just do as they told in making all this possible, having the craziest ideas, like:

> The Asus EEE PC 900 that I bought had a 4 GB SSD held in place by a screw that was soldered in place. This prevented the SSD from being upgraded.

In the end humanity is its biggest adversary

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> But then we have engineers who just do as they told in making all this possible, having the craziest ideas, like:

These engineers are paid A LOT of money.

If that makes them sleep better at night, I wonder...

I guess they do.

I get payed well, I could earn more with my qualifications, but I already earn quite a lot and I have more holiday than any other software person I know in my area. Not sure if more income would make me happier. More wealth, probably, but no paycheck is gonna suddenly make me rich, so that's that.

The person who designed the hard drive lock didn't get rich off it. Some VP did.

That person makes a living, though.

Life isn't just about "getting rich" and being wolf of wall street. Engineers aren't billionaires or VPs but they're making a real good living most places in the US.

That's true. But if you think about it: if you have the skillset to design a laptop, your possibilities for jobs are much grander than making laptop's less upgrade-able

Is it better if they stop maximizing profits and no one gets anything because not enough customers want to pay sustainable prices?

Look at software. Statistically no one spends even 10% of their paid software/content budget on free software/content

We have met the enemy and he is us.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what an individual engineer thinks. They can make a stink about it, but ultimately someone will do the soldering/add it to the design. Perhaps if the engineers had a union and the union cared about it, that could be different. As it stands, it makes zero difference if an engineer fights about these things. The only person it will affect is himself when he loses his job.

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