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What about ownership over value creation? If you're in a creative industry - and I consider software a creative industry - giving away your creations for a wage

What about ownership over value creation? If you're in a creative industry - and I consider software a creative industry - giving away your creations for a wage is psychically harmful. If you're genuinely creating something of value, you want to own some fraction of its value - its revenue-generating value, its future cash flow. The other thing is that options suck. Options have so many conditions, vesting schedules, cliffs, expiry dates, negative tax repercussions... options are not equity. Options don't feel like ownership. Options are lottery tickets that might pay out, maybe. If you agree to be a wage slave for long enough, to give away all the value you create, see the big sales land and the annual recurring revenue build up, you might, one day, own a small slice of that cash stream. Maybe.

ProblemFactory 9y ago
> If you're in a creative industry - and I consider software a creative industry - giving away your creations for a wage is psychically harmful. If you're genuinely creating something of value, you want to own some fraction of its value - its revenue-generating value, its future cash flow. If you work as a freelancer or partner in a small agency that does software development for non-technical clients, then keeping ownership and reselling your work is often possible. You can negotiate to sell the client a non-exclusive license. But it's not realistically possible for an individual contributor at a medium to large tech company. There are too many people involved with each project or product, and no part of it is individually useful. You can't resell a git patch that fixes a bug in an existing codebase.
- barrkel 9y ago
  You can't resell a git patch that fixes a bug in an existing codebase. This isn't an act of creation, usually. I'm thinking more around creating UI components, or developing libraries that add whole new facets of functionality, or enable new ways of working with data. Things that could be reused elsewhere, or enable higher-level programming of application features. But it's not realistically possible for an individual contributor at a medium to large tech company I wouldn't agree to being an individual contributor on a wage-only basis, at this point, without major compensation. A possible exception would be something vocational: going back to working on developer tools, perhaps.

ProblemFactory 9y ago

> If you're in a creative industry - and I consider software a creative industry - giving away your creations for a wage is psychically harmful. If you're genuinely creating something of value, you want to own some fraction of its value - its revenue-generating value, its future cash flow. If you work as a freelancer or partner in a small agency that does software development for non-technical clients, then keeping ownership and reselling your work is often possible. You can negotiate to sell the client a non-exclusive license. But it's not realistically possible for an individual contributor at a medium to large tech company. There are too many people involved with each project or product, and no part of it is individually useful. You can't resell a git patch that fixes a bug in an existing codebase.

barrkel 9y ago
You can't resell a git patch that fixes a bug in an existing codebase. This isn't an act of creation, usually. I'm thinking more around creating UI components, or developing libraries that add whole new facets of functionality, or enable new ways of working with data. Things that could be reused elsewhere, or enable higher-level programming of application features. But it's not realistically possible for an individual contributor at a medium to large tech company I wouldn't agree to being an individual contributor on a wage-only basis, at this point, without major compensation. A possible exception would be something vocational: going back to working on developer tools, perhaps.