This is a trap for engineers.
If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.
If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.
1. create value, then
2. capture some of that created value.
Some people want to skip step 1.
Some bigco jobs have felt that way to me: I don't know if I'm actually creating anything valuable, but I'm getting paid. I think the people who are most anxious right now are the ones who suspect they're not really creating anything of real-world value, and they're terrified that they're about to stop getting paid as well.
It's definitely indicative of an unhealthy organization or society when this happens but generally I've still found this to be the norm.
Indeed, maybe one of the reasons why free market capitalism functions is because it has a built in check (bankruptcy) against this natural human organizational tendency.
I think a large part of why software devs were so well compensated in the last decade was because we were helping build the systems which made the capture of value more efficient (whether from taxi drivers, smbs, property rentals or whatever), not because we were facilitating its creation.
Geohot seems to be telling people to do the opposite. Maximise value and don't consider returns.
Is it hyperbolic yes? Is it perfectly acceptable opinion to have and post on your own blog? Yes.
I think sometimes we all get caught in the I don't agree with them entirely. get him!! Online.
Might take a while but the milk surely becomes butter. His point is valid, maybe your pov is a bit clouded because his baseline is quite high (fame, money) but its not that different at a lower baseline. You bring 1.x to the world that fights over a deemed finite set with 0.x tools.
you can create value by preventing damage in the future, this will get rewarded by the ecosystem itself. That's really hard to describe, but you can try simply removing a danger or annoyance in an ecosystem like your hood or local park then be attentive about what will be better in your own life.
Art creates value with measurable 1.9x in my country, its studied and thus gets funding because they know every 100€ funded will create 190€ of economic value. This means if you give an artist 100€ doesn't matter how - the local economy will grow by 190€. Magic? Well it's just many soft factors - higher quality of life leads to more educated and productive people!
Understand these are all tools to make more of WHAT IS ALREADY THERE and has nothing to do with extracting resources and selling them or bartering. I think your dotcom bubble is an extreme with no value for general advice.
Hope this helps. Hang tight!
For them to survive, they have to have got returns from somewhere - maybe welfare, inheritance, a day job. Someone has to have worried about the returns so they can be free from thinking about it.
And if you don't worry about returns, you will let someone extract it ruthlessly from you, that you contribute millions of value to a company that gives you nothing back. This may be fine to you at some level, but many of the people who you allow to exploit you use the resources they gain as leverage to further their selfish ends, like a certain richest man in the world who helped a certain politician buy an election at the most powerful country in the world.
He was focusing on value, not returns.
That being said, his take is still a dumb take - if you focus on creating value you may not capture any of that value for yourself. If you don't capture that value, someone else certainly will.
The age of creating value for the public good is well and truly over - any value you create for the public good in the form of intellectual output is immediately captured by profit-maximising companies for training your replacement.
It's not just a case of having your value captured by someone else, the AI corps are actually taking your captured value and then using it against you.
It's not a zero sum game. Someone putting my open-source contributions (for example) in their dataset isn't subtracting value from me, or the rest of society.
“Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back, and recognising the unfathomable amount of open-source software that runs the modern world we live in
“Capturing value” is the opposite of this, wall-gardens, proprietary API’s, vendor lock-in, closed-source code… it’s almost antithetical to the idea of open source
I disagree; the GPL has always been transactional. You capture the value in your product by ensuring improvements come back to you. The user "pays" by not being able to close the product off.
If clean-room re-engineering a MIT code base starting from a GPL one is legit, then AI has just made that the status quo for everything.
I agree; this is what I meant by "the value is being captured by someone else".
GPL provides the author with a specific value - you get back improvements. Using AI to launder that IP so that improvements don't have to be upstreamed is effectively capturing the value.
If my employer can't see or don't care about the value I bring, I simply go to one who values me higher. I refuse to participate in office politics and that kind of BS.
I mean I'm not sitting around doing data entry. If I'm automating something it's not my job it's someone else's. Ad a lot of the time that someone else really has other stuff they'd rather do as well.
So my interest is that they recognize that I provide value, and pay me accordingly. It's possible that they recognize my value but choose to underpay.
I want them to pay me as much as possible, they want to pay me as little as possible. We reach a compromise, and if a different company offers a better deal I take it. That's their incentive to pay me a competitive salary. Doesn't matter what I say or how well I play office politics, they are most likely going to try to get a bargain and I am most likely going to leave for a better deal because there's always someone willing to pay more.
I work on a product, I see sales generated by my work. By me specializing in my role and sales specializing their role we both benefit. Is that outsourcing the the worries? I don’t know, but when we get a client email it’s both product and sales collaborating that resolves it.
There are also co-ops, worker owned companies, etc.