I never see anyone suggesting that maybe we should be rethinking the contracts we sign as developers and rethinking how our compensation is determined. Despite how well you think you're being paid, you're being underpaid (this is almost necessarily true economically) -- in addition to that, companies have literally colluded in order to suppress your wages, despite making profits fit for history books.

The idea that an employer owns everything (in particular IP, basically the products of your mind) that you generate on their time or yours while you work for them is bullshit -- it's a complex problem but business has chosen to resolve it 100% in their favor and workers just laid down and taken it. Non-competes and strict laws against selling secrets are one thing, but laying defacto claim to everything you generate is ridiculous, yet is the norm.

-- rant incoming --

Software Engineers/Developers/programmers are just the bottom rung of this century's gold rush. Half the time the mines they're working in are canary-less coal mines. Some drink the kool-aid and think the "startup" they work for is anything more than an aspiring too-big-to-fail company, after a few years they wise up and by that time they're too bogged down with life to care/change course. I remember reading a post earlier in the week on C-level compensation and noting that CTOs were the least paid of all the C levels, despite being maybe the second most directly tied to the economic value of any tech company (sales might be #1).

Despite how smart we think we are, software engineers are fucking stupid. This article is stupid, but only because the premise is stupid (outside of taking ~20 paragraphs to go through random internet musings/anecdata to get to it's point:

> Self-automators show that coders are actually in a unique position to negotiate with employers over which automation-derived gains—like shorter workweeks and greater flexibility to pursue work that interests them—should be kept by workers. There’s little evidence of any interest in doing so, but theoretically, self-automators could organize, and distribute automation techniques among middle- and working-class coders, giving rising to an industry that could actually enjoy that 15-hour workweek. It seems a rare opportunity—perhaps, with the advance of AI, one of the last—to try to set the terms for a mode of automation that puts people first.

People who deliver out-sized value for a company but aren't naive enough to think they'll be anywhere near properly compensated will not share their secrets. The ethics question isn't even on the right side, companies should be paying employees for the value they create properly, this situation exists because that doesn't happen. Companies are "people", yet aren't beholden to ethics and are largely run by people divorced from the realities they impose. Where you land on this issue is basically how your employment contract was written and how you interpreted it, against the backdrop of the culture it's in -- the only difference is that people at the just about always cheat/bend rules or find luck to get to where they are, but preach that they "put in the time" and honestly just worked hard for forever to get where they are.

There is nothing inherently noble about doing work -- that's vassal brain fodder. If working was the only way to build discipline and dedication then we should all be working graveyard shifts at 3 jobs, and not wanting to get rich.