Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

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My problem with these arguments is that there is supposedly a permanent class of “owners” and one of “workers”, and the workers are completely without agency nor ability to become owners themselves. Especially in software, a good idea can be converted into a business with minimal friction no matter where you live.

America has helped created more Latino millionaires than any other business through McDonald’s franchising model. These millionaires are now “owners”.

The Marxist class-based ideology ignores that fortunes are made and lost dynamically and your situation in life is not static. Even worse, once your viewpoint shifts to class-struggle you became a miserable defeatist lacking hope for the future. There is a reason communism died and Venezuela / Argentina are economic basket cases - once you view the economy as a zero-sum struggle, you start scheming to steal from productive private enterprise, and eventually everything collapses into shit.

My recommendation to OP, if you seriously want to raise your station in life, is to start hustling. Find a new job that pays more, start your own business, or immigrate to a higher paying country. No one is going to hand you anything. You have identified a problem - “my company pays me too little and I deserve more”. Option A is to give up, become demoralized, blame society, became a miserable complainer. Option 2 is to strategize about your situation and figure out a path to better compensation. Good luck!

You should be able to make a decent income and be treated fairly without having to take the risk and stress of business ownership.

There's a difference between an indie dev flipping an idea into a profitable app with their own hands vs say the approach taken by the Fast CEO. I didn't even get into ideology stuff or politics, only a material description of what he's seeing - but looks like you are repeating a bunch of rw talking points there without helping the OP.

The "anybody who objects or suggests improvements to the current system are lazy bums who just complain all day" is a trope as old as time.

Man I'm just glad not everyone shares your "praise the statu quo" mindset, or we would never have had any progress at all.

> My problem with these arguments is that there is supposedly a permanent class of “owners” and one of “workers”, and the workers are completely without agency nor ability to become owners themselves.

That's because there is. Whatever workers become owners is usually through a lucky windfall, e.g. finding a niche, being a market first-comer, marrying to a person who is an "owner", etc.

It doesn't scale, so any tales of mass upward mobility are usually exaggerated and not applicable in practice.

However, none of these are an excuse to stop doing anything. You can still play by the capitalist game and improve your station, even without becoming an owner. That still requires some luck (e.g. having a decent childhood and education), but it is at least attainable.

Marx himself participated in the stock market

I see that my post might come off as complaining, but I asure you it's not the case. I do "hustle" as you call it, and that's why I wanted to know other opinions on this.

And I'm not coming at this from a class based marxist ideology. I'm asking for equal pay for equal work, which isn't a radical idea.

Also, though I do work in a software company, I am not a developer or deal with serious tech in anyway.

Your other post said you were demoralized and “quiet quitting”, or collecting a paycheck and fucking around.

That may work for a while, but long term you will be unfulfilled and miserable. It’s time for a change

Definitely a time for change, but that doesn't invalidate my argument about equal pay

You’re downvoted but you’re right to point out that you’re considering your own best next steps but not letting your individual circumstance dictate what you advocate

You need to ask yourself why the company hired you in the first place. You might perceive yourself to be an equal, but as shitty as it is, most likely the company and your colleagues do not. They should, but they probably don't. The company looked overseas to hire you in the first place solely because you were cheap labor. If you were not willing to work for cheap, they would not have hired you at all, they would have hired a local instead or found someone else overseas who would work for much less. That's the unfortunate reality - it's not about you as an individual, it's not about what you do, it's about what you are to them - cheap labor.

Ask yourself, if the roles were reversed, why would you want to hire someone from the United States to work for your business wherever you are based? You'd probably prefer to hire locally. The only reason you'd start looking abroad is if there was some value in doing so, and that might be for cheap labor, or it might be that when selling product overseas you want a person local to that area selling to the people of that area because they might be more successful at selling than a foreigner.

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