alt Hacker NewsThis isn’t harsh at all. As I’ve commented before (but this time as well I do no have the receipts/links), it’s been reported that highly paid programmers in the US also brought in a ton of profit; it was not at all the case that their employers had some thin profit margins because the labor was expensive to them. We talking one million USD profit for a 100K USD salary.
They didn’t even earn anything close to what they were worth. According to Marx’ Labor Theory of Value anyway.
However the dice fall now, one of the possible outcomes is that the tech billionaires take that 100K USD for themselves. The very deserving individuals whose job is to sit their arses on automation assets.
Meanwhile workers from other sectors can gloat about how they are now in the same boat as them. The boat of accepting your ever-meagre reality.
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Or the margins shrink significantly as the space becomes more mature and competitive, and that surplus mostly goes away.
> that highly paid programmers in the US also brought in a ton of profit
In Germany for instance I've seen many a company that treated their programmers as a cost center and they actually were (probably a mutually reinforcing self-fulfilling prophecy).
Too many instances of programmers being deployed in such a way that I couldn't possibly see a way that they would get back even that meagre investment that was being made. Fully irrational dev teams doing useless busy work.
Most German "startups" used to be replaceable with Zapier and Pipedrive. That has probably only gotten worse with the advent of LLMs.