its simply lazy thinking to assume that people are paid what they deserve. not that your point isnt generally fair, but i always feel like we go too far in the direction of assuming people are paid what they deserve.
Why has every response to my comment misinterpreted it? Do you all have an axe to grind against someone and you thought I was that someone?
I'm simply saying that many writers produce work with very little value to other people, and that those writers shouldn't expect to be paid for their "work". Nobody pays me to eat food, even though I enjoy doing that.
How is going to school, starting up a career and writing books is any different than going to school, starting up a career and writing code?
Do you think that the code we write add that much value to society? Unless you are a computer scientist and pushing the boundaries, our code will simply rot away in 4 years and nobody will remember one line of it.
The equivalent in writing for what most programmers do would be marketing, PR, journalism, or technical writing. You can get a paying job to write, it's just going to be that kind of writing - not for your Next Great American Novel. Likewise, I get paid a salary to bolt together shitty enterprise software and automate call-center workers out of jobs - not to tickle my fancy writing video games or exploring the corners of computer science.
Who needs a book about SVG? When I needed to build charts I took couple tutorials plus searched answers on stack overflow. It's way more efficient than reading huge book.
So, such books are needed by very small group of people. And this defines the pay.
> Who needs a book about SVG? When I needed to build charts I took couple tutorials plus searched answers on stack overflow.
The people out there who pride themselves into being able to do their work without relying on googling everything? What if you have an idea or a requirement that has never been done before?
How does what people deserve have anything to do with it?
A programmer might provide $100,000 of value to a company over a year, but that doesn't mean they deserve that much, or even any given fraction of that much. People are and should be paid exactly what they can get for their work. Selling things itself is work.
"People are and should be paid exactly what they can get for their work" what? to see how this thinking makes no sense, ask yourself- chronologically, when did this become true? was it after the great depression? was it during communist china? was it before we had fiat currency and had to barter? did it happen some time recently? why? people have been paid vastly differently, including not at all, for the same work. or maybe you have a pure, survival of the fittest mentality (for lack of a better phrase), and think it has it always been true? if always... then how do you feel if stealing gets you paid more? what if lying gets you paid more? what if fucking over other people gets you paid more? having slaves was incredibly profitable. you shouldn't be paid more for that, right?
I'm simply saying that many writers produce work with very little value to other people, and that those writers shouldn't expect to be paid for their "work". Nobody pays me to eat food, even though I enjoy doing that.