(I am generally not a fan of capitalism in its current form, so I'm playing devil's advocate here to a large degree.)
> Oh come on, individual salaries compete against other people offering their services (and ultimately against the choice to starve by not working for the accepted rates), and has nothing to do with the value people generate.
For the special case of high-demand jobs like software engineer, I don't think this holds up. If you are out for fair compensation in a "stable" job there are plenty of startups out there that will offer you equity. The easiest way, however, to be compensated as close as possible to "the value you generate" is to freelance.
Yes, those options are not optimal and you won't end up earning 100% of the value you generate but are generally the best way we currently have to approximate it. If we now would tweak some other parameters of our overall (international) economic system, like maybe higher taxes for large corporations (or one of X other possible solutions, I'm not trying to predict the right one), we could even end up with a system where injustices like severe wealth inequalities are minimized.
> but this was supposed to be different...
Yes, it was supposed to. They tried and failed, which is something that happens. If you invest too much (not necessarily money) into something that is not proven or even likely to be viable, that's just naive.
> Oh come on, individual salaries compete against other people offering their services (and ultimately against the choice to starve by not working for the accepted rates), and has nothing to do with the value people generate.
For the special case of high-demand jobs like software engineer, I don't think this holds up. If you are out for fair compensation in a "stable" job there are plenty of startups out there that will offer you equity. The easiest way, however, to be compensated as close as possible to "the value you generate" is to freelance.
Yes, those options are not optimal and you won't end up earning 100% of the value you generate but are generally the best way we currently have to approximate it. If we now would tweak some other parameters of our overall (international) economic system, like maybe higher taxes for large corporations (or one of X other possible solutions, I'm not trying to predict the right one), we could even end up with a system where injustices like severe wealth inequalities are minimized.
> but this was supposed to be different...
Yes, it was supposed to. They tried and failed, which is something that happens. If you invest too much (not necessarily money) into something that is not proven or even likely to be viable, that's just naive.