On: AWS Joins the Blender Development Fund

[akhosravian]

I feel like this is a good application of the two red button meme. Do you want a fat middle class or do you want to get paid in line with the value your work produces?

These aren’t inherently mutually incompatible, but the nature of software is distilling hard problems into products with nearly 0 per unit marginal cost. As a result one pretty ok programmer can generate millions of dollars of value.

[ehnto → akhosravian]

I definitely want the fat middle class, but it's a pretty complex reason that probably doesn't shake out in a free market. For one, we can make software more accessible to broader society.

You are right that many types of software produce orders of magnitude more money than was put in. But if you were to look at the broader workforce and industry, you'll find that much software is just a small part of a much bigger machine that has almost nothing to do with software. That's where I would rather see more software developers.

As it stands, VC pours billions into startups that make 0 money until they can flip the investment dollars on the public market. They stand somewhat isolated from the rest of the economy. That's why wages can get so high. Not because the software itself sold billions of dollars worth of service or value.

There's probably lots of software that doesn't get written but would be hugely beneficial to the numerous facets of society, because small businesses can't afford a software engineer when competing with SV wages.

That's me looking at things from afar, I am not in SV, and my experience is on the ground floor of software companies that are producing work for industries that aren't software. It's a totally different market, and I would rather see more software in this space than making another overvalued software doodad valued entirely for it's potential as an advertising platform.