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Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.

Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit.

I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords.

There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.

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Yeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wrong in our current system and we need to sort of shift it towards some of these great hackers who are actually doing the work.

When Starbucks sells a cup of coffee who makes more money? Starbucks or the coffee farmer?

This is the same thing. Businesses that are closer to the consumer make more money than their suppliers.

This is a completely false equivalence. While the coffee farmers do deserve to get paid more Starbucks is also doing an incredible amount of supply chain management, making sure that the stores work and they are also employing a bunch of more people and they're getting a bunch of things in place for that coffee to be sold.

This isn't always true - dropshipping is being a sharecropper of a manufacturer. Enterprise software that most people will never touch has wildly better margins than consumer software like Spotify.

NVidia makes more money on a GPU sale than the vendor selling it, even though it's farther from the consumer.

What is FUTO?

Just a guess, but from the above context maybe futo.org

Yeah, this is what I meant.

I understand that line of thought, but I find it similar to "Shakespeare shouldn't get all the credit, what about the manufacturer of the pen he used? he wouldn't have been able to write his plays without the pen."

It's almost too on the nose to do this level of silly mythologizing through a half-baked analogy (a favorite rhetorical handwave of the so-called "founder cult") of Mark Zuckerberg of all people in this particular thread. Excellent poe if true

I feel the same way you do, then I realize how depressing it is, this attitude that the only thing that matters is monetary compensation / ownership of monetizable patents. I guess I was naive, but that's the game and everything else is noise.

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