On: Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (2018)

[pytester]

>If your labor is so critical and all managers are useless tyrants then why are you choosing to give away your means of production to useless tyrants?

Lack of capital. It's called capitalism, not "i have an ideaism" for a reason.

[jotm → pytester]

I think that's just half of it. Founders and CEOs get a lot of shit, but they're paid well for a good reason: they manage to sell and profit.

Take a successful factory, remove the officers and management, leave it to the assembly line workers - it's a good bet they will fail even if they have some cash to keep it going for a year.

And look at all the startups with insane $$ invested that failed.

[username90 → pytester]

The combined wealth of workers is usually more than enough to start a company. The only reason it doesn't happen is that the workers don't want to risk their hard earned cash.

[newsgremlin → username90]

The risk most fear is losing the ability to provide for yourself and family, for most people that is only one or two significant financial mistakes away.

[ForHackernews → username90]

...which is another way of saying they lack the surplus capital to speculate on starting a company.

[pytester → username90]

There are plenty of businesses where entire countries don't have enough capital to start a competitor (e.g. oil companies, aircraft factories).

It's called capitalism, not "I have an idea-ism" for a reason.

There are some businesses that operate in markets with low barriers to entry but they tend to be A) new and extremely risky or B) hypercompetitive.