Some bigco jobs have felt that way to me: I don't know if I'm actually creating anything valuable, but I'm getting paid. I think the people who are most anxious right now are the ones who suspect they're not really creating anything of real-world value, and they're terrified that they're about to stop getting paid as well.
It's often way easier to capture value than to get compensated for creating it.
It's definitely indicative of an unhealthy organization or society when this happens but generally I've still found this to be the norm.
Indeed, maybe one of the reasons why free market capitalism functions is because it has a built in check (bankruptcy) against this natural human organizational tendency.
I think a large part of why software devs were so well compensated in the last decade was because we were helping build the systems which made the capture of value more efficient (whether from taxi drivers, smbs, property rentals or whatever), not because we were facilitating its creation.
Maybe in the first 10 years of your career, after that you totally have the skills needed to create value from nothing - something no value extracting actor will ever be able to learn.
Might take a while but the milk surely becomes butter. His point is valid, maybe your pov is a bit clouded because his baseline is quite high (fame, money) but its not that different at a lower baseline. You bring 1.x to the world that fights over a deemed finite set with 0.x tools.
Who creates value in the art market? Is it the artist who creates the work? Or the dealer who persuades the buyers that the work has value? As a builder I’m attracted to the fantasy that I can create value with my bare hands just by writing code (or telling the AI to write the code), without needing any of those horrible slimy people in suits to build a business around it. Rock n roll man. If you build it, they will come. Is that the reality though? Or just survival bias based on the fact that a few geeks got lucky during the original dotcom boom when they had no competition from actual businessmen?
you can create value by preventing damage in the future, this will get rewarded by the ecosystem itself. That's really hard to describe, but you can try simply removing a danger or annoyance in an ecosystem like your hood or local park then be attentive about what will be better in your own life.
Art creates value with measurable 1.9x in my country, its studied and thus gets funding because they know every 100€ funded will create 190€ of economic value. This means if you give an artist 100€ doesn't matter how - the local economy will grow by 190€. Magic? Well it's just many soft factors - higher quality of life leads to more educated and productive people!
Understand these are all tools to make more of WHAT IS ALREADY THERE and has nothing to do with extracting resources and selling them or bartering. I think your dotcom bubble is an extreme with no value for general advice.
So you think that engineers that maintain and write the FOSS that runs most of the world IT infrastructure ( Linux, Curl, GIT etc. ) do it for the returns ?
They don't, and as a result most don't get much if any.
For them to survive, they have to have got returns from somewhere - maybe welfare, inheritance, a day job. Someone has to have worried about the returns so they can be free from thinking about it.
And if you don't worry about returns, you will let someone extract it ruthlessly from you, that you contribute millions of value to a company that gives you nothing back. This may be fine to you at some level, but many of the people who you allow to exploit you use the resources they gain as leverage to further their selfish ends, like a certain richest man in the world who helped a certain politician buy an election at the most powerful country in the world.
No, that's exactly parent's point. The premise of the title can be read as "just create value, don't worry about monetizing, things will work out (financially)". Which is invalidated by FOSS
It isn’t. FOSS doesn’t just create value it gives it away for free usually in a not so friendly way to the point entire companies exist to streamline and support projects (eg redhat)
I am pretty sure not most of them. In something like linux, that is the case, but I think there are so many other projects that barely receive financial or any other kind of support
> If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
He was focusing on value, not returns.
That being said, his take is still a dumb take - if you focus on creating value you may not capture any of that value for yourself. If you don't capture that value, someone else certainly will.
The age of creating value for the public good is well and truly over - any value you create for the public good in the form of intellectual output is immediately captured by profit-maximising companies for training your replacement.
It's not just a case of having your value captured by someone else, the AI corps are actually taking your captured value and then using it against you.
Well yeah, business has literally always extracted value from open source software, that’s one of the main benefits of it… (although license violations have been unprecedented with AI)
“Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back, and recognising the unfathomable amount of open-source software that runs the modern world we live in
“Capturing value” is the opposite of this, wall-gardens, proprietary API’s, vendor lock-in, closed-source code… it’s almost antithetical to the idea of open source
> “Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back
I disagree; the GPL has always been transactional. You capture the value in your product by ensuring improvements come back to you. The user "pays" by not being able to close the product off.
> If clean-room re-engineering a MIT code base starting from a GPL one is legit, then AI has just made that the status quo for everything.
I agree; this is what I meant by "the value is being captured by someone else".
GPL provides the author with a specific value - you get back improvements. Using AI to launder that IP so that improvements don't have to be upstreamed is effectively capturing the value.
> The age of creating value for the public good is well and truly over
It's not a zero sum game. Someone putting my open-source contributions (for example) in their dataset isn't subtracting value from me, or the rest of society.
I just do my job to the best of my ability. If I can help a colleague I do. I don't expect to get explicitly credited for everything I do.
If my employer can't see or don't care about the value I bring, I simply go to one who values me higher. I refuse to participate in office politics and that kind of BS.
This. First, the employer has to worry about the returns from which they draw some money to pay you. And for you to even get paid for doing a job, the company has to fear that you won't do it if you don't get paid - in most cases, it's not from the good of heart, but an implicit or explicit threat made by you or on your behalf by other people.
The current problem is automating yourself out of the job. You creating value compounds but as soon as you’re no longer needed the fruit of that compounded value is cut off from you.
Well if you want to spend your days doing something trivial enough to be automated I guess that might be a concern.
I mean I'm not sitting around doing data entry. If I'm automating something it's not my job it's someone else's. Ad a lot of the time that someone else really has other stuff they'd rather do as well.
I work on a product, I see sales generated by my work. By me specializing in my role and sales specializing their role we both benefit. Is that outsourcing the the worries? I don’t know, but when we get a client email it’s both product and sales collaborating that resolves it.
There are also co-ops, worker owned companies, etc.
Not necessarily true. If you're employed by e.g. a contracting company or consulting firm, your value to your employer is in #hours_billable because you are their product.
Not really sure what your point is. The employer is worried about getting good return on their investment in me, I am worried about getting good return on the time I'm investing in the company.
So my interest is that they recognize that I provide value, and pay me accordingly. It's possible that they recognize my value but choose to underpay.
I want them to pay me as much as possible, they want to pay me as little as possible. We reach a compromise, and if a different company offers a better deal I take it. That's their incentive to pay me a competitive salary. Doesn't matter what I say or how well I play office politics, they are most likely going to try to get a bargain and I am most likely going to leave for a better deal because there's always someone willing to pay more.
If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.