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> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit. I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people
by preommr 2y ago
> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.
Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit.
I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords.
There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoYeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wrong in our current system and we need to sort of shift it towards some of these great hackers who are actually doing the work.
- jimhi 2y agoWhat is FUTO?
- dualogy 2y agoJust a guess, but from the above context maybe futo.org
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoYeah, this is what I meant.
- luckylion 2y agoI understand that line of thought, but I find it similar to "Shakespeare shouldn't get all the credit, what about the manufacturer of the pen he used? he wouldn't have been able to write his plays without the pen."
- advael 2y agoIt's almost too on the nose to do this level of silly mythologizing through a half-baked analogy (a favorite rhetorical handwave of the so-called "founder cult") of Mark Zuckerberg of all people in this particular thread. Excellent poe if true
- screcth 2y agoWhen Starbucks sells a cup of coffee who makes more money? Starbucks or the coffee farmer? This is the same thing. Businesses that are closer to the consumer make more money than their suppliers.
- stuartjohnson12 2y agoThis isn't always true - dropshipping is being a sharecropper of a manufacturer. Enterprise software that most people will never touch has wildly better margins than consumer software like Spotify.
- badpun 2y agoNVidia makes more money on a GPU sale than the vendor selling it, even though it's farther from the consumer.
- ens7 2y ago[dead]
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoThis is a completely false equivalence. While the coffee farmers do deserve to get paid more Starbucks is also doing an incredible amount of supply chain management, making sure that the stores work and they are also employing a bunch of more people and they're getting a bunch of things in place for that coffee to be sold.
- fullshark 2y agoI feel the same way you do, then I realize how depressing it is, this attitude that the only thing that matters is monetary compensation / ownership of monetizable patents. I guess I was naive, but that's the game and everything else is noise.