A bit more pushback on both points.

> I would not wish startup lifestyle on anyone and I don't advocate for that. I may have been unclear, but the engineers in question are exactly the kind of people who don't need to take outside investments and are able to bootstrap (as in use their own funds and rely on immediate/eventual cashflow).

The provide data is gross income, not net. Subtract federal and state taxes and you're at a more realistic figure for net income. Then subtract cost of living (i.e. property taxes, utilities) etc., and you're at a much lower figure for net expendable income than the numbers here. Your argument also assumes they're in a position personally to take on the associated risks of leaving stable employment and pursue a "moonshot" relying on savings and hopeful future cashflow. They might not be there. Also, running a business/organization is a far cry from slinging code and architecting and requires a different temperament, personality, and skill set. The individuals we're speaking of might be lacking in those or the desire to pursue such an activity. They might rather solve problems than deal with GAAP vs non-GAAP compliance issues, HR policies, marketing, or revenue generation. All things a corporate leader must address that an engineer solving problems might only ever have to address tangentially.

> They would have the independence, resources and authority to create self-sustaining social enterprises ( maximizing social impact rather than profits for external shareholders.), rallying supporters around their mission.

There are a lot of assumptions rolled into that sentence that I want to unpack.

First, what you're describing sounds incredibly similar to a non-profit and we're swimming in them. Why would engineers do a better job at building organizations that maximize social impact than people who spend their entire lives doing nothing but? The only comparative advantages I see are (possible) money and engineering acumen.

Second, how are we defining "social impact"? That's an incredibly nebulous term and one could argue that being part of a business generates social impact. Think of profit and revenue as an indicator of value provided. The more people buying and using my services generally implies I'm providing something of value. Ergo, pursuit of a profit and providing services people will expend money to pay for might be indicative of activities having a "social impact". People are willing to expend money for your solution to $PROBLEM over the possible alternatives indicating you're providing some value. As an engineer if I help the company solve a problem that lets them scale services to increase the number of people who can use it, offer new features, etc. I'm increasing the corporation's value proposition and providing a service to people to help solve their problems and meet their needs, I would argue that is a positive social impact.

Third, what is a "self-sustaining social enterprise"? Generally, I've heard those called corporations and they resemble normal every day businesses. What is different about your notion other than they're privately held? They'll still need to generate a profit in order to grow and increase revenues to meet growing payroll and expenses. I'm having a hard time understanding how you're seeing social impact as different from bringing in $$$ in exchange for providing a solution to problems.

The other assumption here I think we need to address is the notion that the individuals possess the charisma to rally people to the cause. You're describing someone with an incredibly charismatic personality that draws people in, that's a significant minority of the population. Why is that skill set attributed to engineers making big figures? Generally, I've found the opposite to be true, the charismatics and visionaries tend to not be engineers -- engineering is generally too rigid for the charismatics and the people stuff can be too squishy and shades of grey for the engineering types.

> Seeding acquired knowledge back into the ecosystem is an orthogonal/complementary activity and depends more on their employer. I am not sure we can encourage the engineers to do that. Also, while sharing innovation "blueprints" is definitely a net positive for the ecosystem, I think it disproportionally benefits the megacorps, while indies and middle-sized tech businesses are being slowly squeezed out. The web is becoming more centralized and I am wary of that trend.

The open source culture is booming compared to what it was a few years ago. More people are involved in OSS and more companies are pulling in OSS software to solve their problems. Is the system perfect? No. Will it ever be perfect? No. Is it better than what it has been or could have been? Heck yes.

How does it overly benefit megacorps? Yes, they might have the resources to pursue implementations faster, but a ton of the innovation on those systems is happening at the small to medium sized corporate level where the engineers have the freedom to innovate. I'm missing the link between the web being centralized and small to medium sized businesses getting squeezed. Generally, if there's a "squeeze" it's the small to mid sized businesses getting bought out by megacorps to fill needs, which, is usually an encouraged outcome for some of them because they aren't going to "get big" otherwise and scale up to the point where they have more than minute impact. Being inside megacorp gives them the opportunity to tap resources they would lack otherwise and get their tech into way more people's hands. I'll raise the case of the Storm processor. It started as a side project at Backtype and become Nathan Martz's full time gig when Twitter bought them out. It's one of the "big" open source data processors on the market and they're still innovating on it.

Ideally there's a balanced ecosystem. Big corporations have resources and manpower, but are prone to inertia and lack responsiveness in the face of new technology. Smaller corps lack resources and manpower but try to get an edge through creating new technology or adopting it, proving it out, and extending it. Big corps finally come around and either adopt the new tech along with the rest of the people in the ecosystem or buy out small corp to get the people who built or are extremely experienced with the tech/platform/framework. These people then get the resources + manpower to work on their projects. Eventually some of them get bored or hampered by the inertia, drop out of megacorp, and start or return another small corp and repeat the process. That's the trend I see playing out over and over again.

Yes, there ARE exceptions to the rule. I.E. LinkedIn + Kafka etc.