alt Hacker News“Just become an owner” assumes the barrier is courage.
It isn’t. It’s capital.
Risk looks very different when you’re risking surplus wealth versus when you’re risking your rent, healthcare, visa, and your entire savings in one concentrated bet.
Calling that a simple matter of “choice” is fiction.
Saying most engineers could just become owners if they wanted to is like saying most renters could just buy apartment blocks.
Technically possible. Structurally delusional.
Ownership compounds. Salaries don’t. Equity scales exponentially. Labour income scales linearly. The system is designed that way.
You can defend it as efficient. You can defend it as rational. But pretending everyone is standing at the same starting line deciding between “comfort” and “ambition” is cosplay.
The dividing line isn’t grit. It’s who can afford to fail.
If you're an engineer in tech, you can generally afford to fail. I'm speaking from experience. I didn't grow up rich or anything close to it. I became a founder because "well I can always get a job" was a good fallback plan.
This isn't delusional, this is reality for a huge percentage of tech founders.
Then factor in the fact that it costs very little to start a web/app company compared to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. And the fact that funding is available (e.g. Y Combinator). And you have a lot of explaining to do for why so many well-paid engineers don't even try to start something.
> But pretending everyone is standing at the same starting line...
No one in this discussion has implied that everyone is starting at the same starting line. It's obvious that having more money makes things easier. As it should, because that's the entire point of money.
But the reality is that there are millions of millions of people in America today, even from the lower classes, who have access to the internet + a laptop + free time + the ability to survive a failure.