I am frustrated by discourses in the software community that suggest most concentrations of wealth are necessarily evidence of theft, partly because that is untrue and partly because it's extremely instrumentally suboptimal for builders of things to think that.
This thought occasioned by an easy sideswipe on HN this morning against people who live in the "beach resort with the $5m+ homes", but I've heard this invoked against everyone from billionaires to developers making $100k, and it drives me *freaking batty.*
Part of the work of the software community is taking people who have socioeconomic backgrounds where they are unlikely to have known e.g. millionaires growing up and having them build valuable things.
It is hard to do this if they think all millionaires are thieves.
It is hard to do this if they think all millionaires are thieves.
You will meet millionaires working in software. That is not an exceptional outcome for people who work in the industry for large portions of their career. Indeed, the exceptional thing about the software industry is that it routinely delivers this outcome to non-executives.
This is exacerbated by class distinctions where, in the places where wealth tends to concentrate, talking about it explicitly in an instructive manner is culturally verboten.
So you end up with folks involuntarily playing a game whose rules they don't know, badly, and losing.
So you end up with folks involuntarily playing a game whose rules they don't know, badly, and losing.
