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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I have go call bullshit on this. You are probably younger than every Alaskan fishing boat operator today and you could go do that tomorrow if you really wanted. Also, why would it be better to pay 80% of your labor directly to a king who would let you starve after a bad harvest or two than it would be to deal with some douchey suits?

I mean you can't really be serious with this, it's just a diatribe against the existing corporate hegemony, am I wrong?

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> Also, why would it be better to pay 80% of your labor directly to a king who would let you starve after a bad harvest or two than it would be to deal with some douchey suits?

Most of the time its literally the same thing: pay 80% of the value of your labor to someone who doesn't care if you starve in a drought.

In medieval times what you produced had intrinsic value. If you work in a corporation it's impossible to isolate the value you are creating from the company itself. Maybe they take 80% of your value, or maybe you are extracting a paycheck and providing negative value. In any case though, I find it disingenuous to seriously compare this to being essentially enslaved by a feudal lord.

Companies are built on employees creating more value than they are paid. That's obvious. The fact that its harder to measure who produces how much doesn't change the dynamic, it just means you have to do the analysis statistically instead of individually.

The other thing companies are built on is employees being able to create more value within the company than outside of it. Every single employee has the option of quitting and founding their own business. Several do. Many take a pay cut to exercise this right.

Right, but that was true of feudal structures too.

I'm not sure if you're trying a reductio ad absurdum or what, but your point is lost on me because the comparison is foolish on its face.

This is a crucially important point. The question becomes: to what extent does the accumulation of capital, expertise, equipment in a corporation render a software engineer able to produce more value than working on their own, or in a partnership, or other arrangement?

I would imagine this varies dramatically by industry. I know several of the biosciences, for example, do require a lot of specialized people, equipment and tons of cash... Many of the areas we're seeing disrupted by startups are areas where you'd hit diminishing returns (from, say, more equipment / capital) rather quickly.

It's funny, I actually met a guy once who worked on Alaskan fishing boats and decided to move into programming. I don't think he regretted the move.

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