> Silicon Valley has a weird relationship to capitalism. They sometimes like to pretend to themselves that work isn't about money, and the laws of supply and demand shouldn't apply to labor.
What's amusing is that SV is also a place bankrolled by VC, and the VC firms don't buy into that stuff at all. They have no problem paying huge bonuses to lure people away Morgan Stanley, Goldman, etc. But you'll rarely hear them espouse for engineers the mantras they believe for financial professionals: you gotta pay those big bonuses if you want to get the "top talent."
Of course they want engineers to be desperate, it's a lot cheaper that way. This idea that the best ideas come from desperation isn't necessarily accurate anyway, builders want to build, its in their blood. It's why I hack on the weekends and played with breadboards and legos as a kid.
Having enough money allows me to focus on doing what I love best: building stuff. I want to be a part of building the Holodeck, paying me less won't make me want it more.
It's perhaps difficult to quantify the marginal contribution of your latest hire. However, almost all companies are keeping track of their revenue-per-employee, and it's fairly common around here to remark that your company is not yet doing well until that number hits about $200,000/man-year. Apple and Google and the like have about double that.
At that level of revenue, yes, there are taxes and capital costs to pay, but you can also afford damn fine salaries, too.
I'm already engaged to someone, and sorry, but I really do feel pretty uncomfortable with open fanboyism. I guess for a better response I might paraphrase Marx: the development of you is the basis for the free development of us.
But you see I've been reading HN since the beginning and the endless neoliberal bullshit has made me despair for hacker culture--to the point where I'm now embarrassed to tell educated people that I work in the software startup scene. I'm ashamed to call myself a hacker because of the people the word is associated with.
The smartest people I know see only bad things coming from Silicon Valley. I try to convince them that there are a few good hackers out there who can make positive contributions to civilization...
But even the hero Aaron Swartz has a blighted track record because he created reddit--a shitheap that is destroying culture and causing a resurgence in "White Nationalism" aka Nazism.
If you recognize that memes don't matter, reddit's most notable cultural achievement is that it has become the biggest white pride recruiting site on the planet. And this is the legacy of our BEST hacker activist... this is pg's big hack of society.
So your existence on HN has been meaningful. There are other hackers with similar thoughts, but they rarely speak up publicly. The ones that I know have learned to keep quiet or use pseudonyms so they can get by without conflict.
Funny thing, Reddit mostly doesn't have an indigenous white-nationalism community. What you see is, mostly, a raid from Stormfront that turned into a permanent infestation owing to Redditors' bizarre notion that the First Amendment guarantees them a right to say anything they want on Reddit without censure or moderation.
What's amusing is that SV is also a place bankrolled by VC, and the VC firms don't buy into that stuff at all. They have no problem paying huge bonuses to lure people away Morgan Stanley, Goldman, etc. But you'll rarely hear them espouse for engineers the mantras they believe for financial professionals: you gotta pay those big bonuses if you want to get the "top talent."