I'm also poor. I once told a well-off investor that if I counted the hours I spent working on my open source project, my hourly rate over my career would be bel

I'm also poor. I once told a well-off investor that if I counted the hours I spent working on my open source project, my hourly rate over my career would be below that of a McDonald's employee. His answer was "It's an investment in yourself, you'll make it all back later." - He was partly right, it was an investment, but all it got me was a foot in the door at that company as a regular run-of-the-mill software developer, nothing more. 2 years later, I'm a proven 100x developer, working on some of the most complex projects imaginable as self-employed - I managed to pull myself up by the bootstraps but I still earn much less than all my ex-colleagues who work bureaucratic corporate jobs. I don't see anything changing for the better. It only seems to be changing for the worst. Nobody even cares about open source anymore. I'll have to be a 1000x developer by the end of the year just to make ends meet as a self-employed developer. The situation is getting so bad, I find myself fantasizing about communism. Anything to end this crony-capitalist nightmare. I often think of the quote "In communism, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." - The "pretend to work" aspect sounds like an upgrade over the deal I'm currently getting.