this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Are most white-collar work environments unpleasant? I'm a software developer and I have never worked somewhere that didn't make a reasonable effort to keep me happy, properly rested, and in good health in order to improve my productivity.
Pulling together all the resources and ideas to make something happen is itself a valid skill. They're way overpaid for it, but it is real work.
Steve Jobs, in particular, created with help the original Mac and was screwed over by other powerful people in the business. He created the Mach kernel and the NeXT workstation before Apple crawled back to him for help salvaging the business.
He might have been an arrogant prick, but he did have the ability to bring vision into reality, and he helped make a lot of people other than himself wealthy.
We have this thing called specialization in modern society. Do you think an electrician can design and produce a microchip or a math teacher can manage a large corporate entity? We all make choices. Some of us have more options or more help.
The accountants and lawyers pull together resources to make something happen, and are the ones that do all of the math and all the legal research to see if something can happen, the one that barked the order didn't. And as for ideas, the world would be a better place if that was left to the scientists, developers, craftspeople, and engineers that have the beneficial ones that might actually create or improve something of worth.
"Turn a product you could buy into a subscription you have to rent" has been the most widely implemented "idea" the modern CEO has been inspired to have, aside from laying off the people that made them their money the same week they report record profits. If you call that a skill of any positive use to society, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And Steve jobs wasn't just a shitty marketing grifter who pretended he was some titan of invention, he was also a notoriously shitty person off the clock. It's sad people look up to a wealthy man who let his child subsist on welfare simply because he could.
And yet, he's the one who got those products to the public, and many love them. I'm not fond of Apple, but I have to acknowledge success. I'm not claiming he's a good person. Heck I agree with much you said, but being a business leader is a legitimate role and requires real skills.
Factory workers, retail workers, delivery people got those products to the public. Steve jobs didn't.
Who hired them? Who gave them direction?
Yep, and they were just about to do it when that scumbag stole their thunder, right? They had the entire design all set and came together as a collective to make it happen, and Jobs stepped in and stole all the money and credit!
Yes, he and the little owner's club did indeed steal the workers thunder, as our intentionally rigged economy is designed to maintain in perpetuity. The iphone was just the latest cycle of keeping the workers separated from the means of production, aka meaningful capital required for R&D and manufacturing.
Steve Jobs' "skill" was being receptive to repeating the vicious cycle of giving almost all the profits of products his engineers developed to the people who already exploited/coerced/stole the worker's money last time and the time before that in exchange for his class traitor cut (I guess he saw his daughter as an externality he didn't need to worry about) for selling out the other people like him that didn't come from wealth, which just propagates the little owner's club having more while ensuring the non-owners continue to not benefit from what they invent, discover, build, transport. They have the ideas and do the work, and then the small population with enough ill gotten capital to commission the machines get the vast majority of the capital profit... yet again, ad infinitum.
I'm sorry that impresses you, but of course the major media the oligarchs own and the K-Colleges of Economics curriculum they dictate indoctrinates most Americans to find their grift very impressive. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps!
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html
I don't have to click the link because I know about that already. I'm not justifying the greed, just acknowledging the reality. There are people with these skills who are not self-serving. We likely agree on many things, but I work with reason, not ideology. I also try to avoid insulting people for telling me things I don't like unless they are insulting, of course.
Here's something you won't like - Marxism does not work, for the same reason the 1% collect all the wealth. Greed is a human condition.
I’m a software dev aswell and I think they do try to look after us because our wages are a pretty big investment. For the other people on minimum wage, they do not give a fuck.
Sometimes the management is clever enough to realise it's much more cost effective to keep your knowledgeable employees happy than to have to go through the process of hiring replacements. Sadly there are plenty of ladder-climbers and egotists who don't get this, and that's even when they consider the workers they're fucking around to be highly skilled. When the powers that be consider their employees to be easily replaceable then they lose all motivation to treat them like anything other than human resource.