alt Hacker NewsYeah, but the order is still
1. create value, then
2. capture some of that created value.
Some people want to skip step 1.
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.