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Richard Montañez has all my admiration for what he achieved. This is a beautiful story. Unfortunately, those kinds of stories also play into the narrative: be

Richard Montañez has all my admiration for what he achieved. This is a beautiful story. Unfortunately, those kinds of stories also play into the narrative: be a good model employee, make sure the floors shine and trust that hard work, and great ideas will make you deservedly insanely rich. Because there are smart CEOs who will see all of that Cinderella, capitalist version. Too rare to be significant as a policy. Most likely does not scale. Too often, dreams are useful to convince people to accept their fate.

cultus 6y ago
It seems like these feel-good stories about benevolent capitalists get a little less traction now, although perhaps not in forums populated by the labor aristocracy.
dvdhnt 6y ago
> Too often, dreams are useful to convince people to accept their fate. It's sad how right you are. And it's sad how trying to educate others and acknowledge the facade puts a target on your back, then suddenly the same people who you want to help now see you as the enemy. Cheers.
troupe 6y ago
> make sure the floors shine and trust that hard work, and great ideas will make you deservedly insanely rich. Generally someone who is known for doing a good job of whatever it is that they are doing and has a lot of initiative are going to have more opportunities than someone who doesn't really care to do a good job and has no initiative. Showing up for practice doesn't mean you will be a great athlete, but not showing up is a good way to dramatically reduce your chances.
lovehashbrowns 6y ago
100% absolutely true. I respect Richard for what he did and how he has viewed things, but I am much more cynical about the world. This is likely a small exception out of hundreds of thousands of times that "the janitor" got completely screwed over, if they were even given a chance to begin with. I mean, it happens on the daily. The startup I previously worked for had this "test" API, I helped turn it into an essential API that brought the company a ton of money, and I saw 0 of it. My title got bumped, I guess. And now, I work on something even less visible. If I do something at work that saves thousands of my coworkers thousands of hours a quarter, I don't see any of that. Nor can I show it, because the higher-up management people don't know what a Jenkins is or what an Artifactory is. How do I sweep these "floors" so well that the CEO can see any of it? Even the coworkers that use my stuff directly don't give a shit because they have code to write and my improvements save them ~20 minutes a day every other day or two.

cultus 6y ago

It seems like these feel-good stories about benevolent capitalists get a little less traction now, although perhaps not in forums populated by the labor aristocracy.

dvdhnt 6y ago

> Too often, dreams are useful to convince people to accept their fate. It's sad how right you are. And it's sad how trying to educate others and acknowledge the facade puts a target on your back, then suddenly the same people who you want to help now see you as the enemy. Cheers.

troupe 6y ago

> make sure the floors shine and trust that hard work, and great ideas will make you deservedly insanely rich. Generally someone who is known for doing a good job of whatever it is that they are doing and has a lot of initiative are going to have more opportunities than someone who doesn't really care to do a good job and has no initiative. Showing up for practice doesn't mean you will be a great athlete, but not showing up is a good way to dramatically reduce your chances.

lovehashbrowns 6y ago

100% absolutely true. I respect Richard for what he did and how he has viewed things, but I am much more cynical about the world. This is likely a small exception out of hundreds of thousands of times that "the janitor" got completely screwed over, if they were even given a chance to begin with. I mean, it happens on the daily. The startup I previously worked for had this "test" API, I helped turn it into an essential API that brought the company a ton of money, and I saw 0 of it. My title got bumped, I guess. And now, I work on something even less visible. If I do something at work that saves thousands of my coworkers thousands of hours a quarter, I don't see any of that. Nor can I show it, because the higher-up management people don't know what a Jenkins is or what an Artifactory is. How do I sweep these "floors" so well that the CEO can see any of it? Even the coworkers that use my stuff directly don't give a shit because they have code to write and my improvements save them ~20 minutes a day every other day or two.