georgist

" For example, how do you measure the value of a scalable, modular, and extensible platform that will serve as a basis for growth over the next 5-10 years?" your questions provides evidence of why I would prefer a wage free environment. As it currently stands now, a business will pay you an upfront fee to develop this platform, and earn most of the profit for the next ten years. I would rather earn a royalty from my platform in all these ten years( this sorts out the technical debt issue).

Again this is not about worker Vs business, it is about what arrangement makes more money for everyone especially from the business perspective, and are incentives aligned.

Nice questions. if we had 'teams' of programmers and each team competes for new members, that is where 'the baseball like draft' analogy from. The programmers would be earning an income from their team so I am not about turning developers into contract workers. Just to clarify a team could be a co-op( or whatever structure).

Making more money doesn't have to come from wage inflation. it can be derived from cost saving. Just like if you are a member of housing co-op, you still pay rent but the benefits you derive are incomparable if you just paid directly to a landlord.

For a capitalistic business, the two options are either pay a fixed monthly wage and keep most of the profit or have no upfront wage costs and share your profits(royalties).It all comes down to preferences and what position each party wants/can negotiate.

It is not perfection I seek but less options that I seek to avoid. About Egos that where the "xprize' esque comes in, business pay for explicit specific outcomes(think of it as a service level agreement).

A programmer is a member of a 'guild', where he/she draws a monthly income. A business needs some sales/biz dev automation done. The usual approach is to either hire someone or contract out the work, what I propose instead is that the business puts out specific outcomes that they want with a monetary value.

For example; we will pay x amount per customer who stays for 3 years and we spend only time(t) per week servicing this customer. The benefit here is,instead of maybe just creating a DB and automating invoice collection(which are just features and piecemeal work) the programmer and business are forced to look at the totality of biz operations and explicitly state the cost and value of each action, step and procedure.This way a programmer can directly identify the value that they created from cost savings or higher billings. To me the 'Xprize' is about specific successes and outcomes.Even if these outcomes may take time to be seen, the programmer is earning an income from the guild and the business pays up for actual value when it is experienced.