Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

maybe the issue is capitalism where even if your productivity multiplies x100

your salary stays x1

and your work hours stay x1

But aren't you supposed to be incentivized to work harder by having equity?

Quite literally not.

Capitalism encourages you to put your butt in your own seat and reap the rewards of your efforts.

Of course it also provides you the decision making to keep your butt in someone else’s seat if the risk vs. reward of going your own isn’t worth it.

And then it allows your employer to put another butt in your seat if you don’t adopt efficiency patterns.

So: capitalism is compatible with communism as an option, but it’s generally a suboptimal option for one or both parties.

Equity is a lottery ticket. Is sacrificing my happiness or life balance in the near term worth the gamble that A) my company will be successful, and B) that my equity won’t have been diluted to worthlessness by the time that happens? At higher levels of seniority/importamce/influence this might make sense, but for most people I seriously doubt it does, especially early in their careers.

That doesn’t happen anywhere outside of Silicon Valley.

No it doesn't. People tell that story but the system is incredibly heavily leveraged to prevent that.

As a non-founder / not a VC you max get a few percentage points, and its mostly paper toilet money until there's an exit or IPO, and the founders will always try to squeeze you if they can, not because they're bad people, but because the system incentivises it. (you'll keep getting diluted in future rounds)

tbh, if im gonna bust my ass I'd rather own the thing.

And even in Silicon Valley you get the survivor ship bias of the 1% of companies getting to IPO and making their employees decent exit stories...

99% of startups die off worthless and your equity never realises.

Maybe in a true -capitalistic- market that'd happen.

but the state keeps meddling and making oligarchs and friends have unfair advantages.

It's hard to compete when the system is rigged from the start.

More accurate representation is this:

Productivity multiplies x2 You keep your job x0.5 Your salary x0.8 (because the guy we just fired will gladly do your job for less) Your work hours x1.4 (because now we expect you to do the work of 2 people, but didn’t account for all the overhead that comes with it)

A recent job offer for a startup was a 5 year vest with a 2 year cliff. Seriously?

Capitalism is exactly about amassing capital to make others reliant on capitalist providing capital for the tools necessary to do the work, then extracting rent from the value produced.

In true capitalist market you end up with oligarchy.

also a fair point :)