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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

I did not say this. If I build it in five days - and for simplicity assuming no future maintenance, support or service costs - than I would want to make say $5k for five days of work. Profit is revenue minus costs and costs include salaries. So I never said anyone should do anything for free.

But I have a problem with making money without doing any work. If you put in a week of work, then you should be paid for a week of work, you should not profit from indefinitely selling the result of that work again and again. Or even worse, make it into a subscription so that you do not even have to sell it again and again but can just repeatedly extract money from your customers.

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Utterly insane. If you write a piece of software you can only sell it once? That makes no sense.

And a subscription means you are administering a server (or some menagerie of “serverless” resources) which is an ongoing service that requires maintenance and cost, so that’s what people are paying for, a premium to not have to do that administration themselves.

Like you just want people to suffer? It pains you if people make money without a sufficient amount of hardship?

Not sell it only once. Nobody would ever have bought an Office license if it would be priced at development costs. But lifetime revenue should be in a reasonable relation to development costs. And everything gets more complicated with expected support cost and updates and whatnot. I can not possibly mention all imaginable complications.

Just take the general gist, if you are not working, then you should not be making money. And I do not want people to suffer, I want them to be better off. There are many people that actually do hard or badly paid work, software development is not one of them.

If you overcharge your customers to be able to hang out at the beach half of the week, then you are just taking money away from them that they could otherwise spend on say higher priced vegetables improving the wages of seasonal workers.

Maybe another way to see it is that I dislike people that are already well off not being satisfied. What if everyone wanted to only work four hours a day and earn $45k per month? Does this sound like an sustainable idea?

You are extremely confused about how markets work. People are not going to willingly pay above-market prices for vegetables just because they have extra money. The pay for seasonal workers is not going to change if someone is able to buy Devutils for $3 instead of $30. A year ago the software didn't even exist, so nobody was able to buy it and guess what, the pay for seasonal workers was pretty much the same.

> What if everyone wanted to only work four hours a day and earn $45k per month? Does this sound like an sustainable idea?

With sufficient automation, sure. The goal should be that we all have everything we need without anyone having to work.

I completely agree with your last sentences but I guess this is still quite a bit in the future and I am not convinced that everyone would get what they need even if we would completely automate the economy. Even with complete automation there will still be limited resources and I would almost bet that some people will use all their powers to get some more stuff for themselves and the expense of everyone else.

With regards to the seasonal workers, you are of course right. I replied to so many comments that probably most of them ended up not very clear. What I had in mind was that if you would not overpay in some area you would have more money left for other things, so you could more easily decide to buy things produced under better conditions with more fair wages or whatnot.

You would probably also see less need to push back in case of price increases, say you could be more supportive of seasonal workers unionizing to demand better wages or whatever. So I did not want to say that wages have to increase, but not throwing money out of the window for app subscriptions would give you more freedom for other buying decisions that could lead to an improvement.

> I would want to make say $5k for five days of work

You completely ignore expected value. The most likely outcome is that you make nothing for your five days of work. A functioning market requires outsized returns to compensate for the huge failure risk that goes unseen.

90% chance of making nothing, 10% chance of making 10x your salary is a stable state that is not exploitable.

> If you put in a week of work, then you should be paid for a week of work, you should not profit from indefinitely selling the result of that work again and again

do you think the same for authors and musicians?

The first question is, do I have to? If not, then I will have to deal with all kinds of intermediate cases, say an industrial designer or film music composers. But ad hoc I tend towards making a difference and accepting that there will be a whole lot of cases that are not obvious how to deal with them. Sports professionals would be another tricky category.

I would say it lies in the nature of being an artist that the products are unique and unpredictable. Competition applies to a much smaller extent. You write one great novel at age 20, should you be able to live on the royalties for the rest of your life? In the end the consumer decides anyway, if they buy enough books at a high enough price, then you can.

As I wrote in another comment, there is also a moral aspect to this. If people willingly pay your subscription fee, then this is what it is. But do you find it good to sell your software at an inflated price in order to make yourself a nice life? How would you feel if everyone else did the same, if the supermarket staff would all only work half a day, make $45k a month and put the bill for that onto your grocery prices? I bet you would hope that competition solves the issue, otherwise your subscription income will no longer afford you a nice life.

> In the end the consumer decides anyway, if they buy enough books at a high enough price, then you can.

Why is this different from software?

The software priced here is very cheap. DevUtils costs lifetime less than what an hourly wage of SWE intern costs.

I don’t even know what logic is implied in here regarding the supermarket staff.

If you make $40k profits per month, the price is not as cheap as it could be, that is probably around the median yearly income in the USA. My point is just that this is not a sustainable thing, not everyone can take $40k home each month and only work 4 hours per day. Here it is just a single guy and the result of that is not noticeable, a few thousand people pay a handful bugs more each month than they could. But just imagine what would happen if we would cut the total working hours of the entire economy in half and gave everyone half a million dollars per year.

All the money you make based on work is really free-riding on earlier investments in knowledge anyway.

Why should you make $100/hr just because you did some studying 10 years ago? If you do a week of work, you should just be paid for that week of work, not for your 10 years of past experience and your week of work, right?

It seems like you're taking a pretty weird stance against market economics, made more strange by not proposing socialist/egalitarian policies as a potential improvement ("I have a problem with making money without doing any work")

I already got paid for the past ten years. If you had to attend university to get ready for your job, then you can have a bit more to compensate for that time without income.

I have nothing against market economics in general, I would welcome competitors driving those outsized profits down. When I say everyone should earn roughly the same, then this is what I think would be a desirable state, but in this case market dynamics are unlikely to yield this result because not everyone can switch to doing every possible job for all kinds of reasons.

This is what makes unskilled jobs pay relatively bad despite this work being important and often hard or unpleasant, but the mechanism to change that, leaving for better payed higher skilled jobs to reduce supply is just not available to many.

So I would think that I am in general in favor of market dynamics, but it has to be a working market.

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