[Bartweiss]

> Most industries require contact with other humans, and don’t rely on overwhelming amounts of capital to try to create vast power imbalances between you and the people you’re allegedly serving.

I agree with the statement, but I'm not sure it squares with your list? Tech and banking aren't unique in offering the chance to sit alone in an office and turn early advantages into ludicrous excess.

Broadly, we're talking about jobs that have power-law payouts among their practitioners, require highly skilled (and hard to interchange) labor, and don't intrinsically punish jerks (meaning limited interaction with coworkers or customers). Not all of them make billions, but they get something exponential that encourages them to compete - fame or professional power or job security.

That's a lot of careers. Orchestral musicians fit, lawyers fit, surgeons fit in spades, artists and mathematicians and philosophers all fit.

Obviously tech and banking are not equivalent to those things - heart surgeons have never destroyed the economy. But I think it's a catastrophic mistake to try and understand why tech and banking cause these problems by acting like the professional demeanor is unique. That is at best a starting point, a way of acknowledging that if yanking pieces out of society is easy and rewarding it will happen. The question from there is "how do we stop that from happening?"

(I'm not sure how much we honestly disagree, I just think the distinction is important. That Jenga metaphor is fantastic.)

[falcolas]

Something of an aide from the main thrust of your argument:

> Orchestral musicians fit

My friend who was in the Boston Pops disagrees - the pay was crap (he had to provide music lessons on the side to maintain a reasonable income), the pressure was humongous, and their off-hours practice to keep at the top of their game puts our own hobby programming efforts to shame. Like video games, all musicians want to perform in the big orchestras, creating a highly competitive supply glut.

I'm also fairly certain that most mathematicians and philosophers come nowhere near to our power distribution curve.

That leaves us in the company of bankers, lawyers, and surgeons. Not the highest prestige group of people to exist alongside. Especially since, while well off, we're making nowhere near their "Fuck You" levels of money.

[Bartweiss]

From the responses here, I think I was unclear with the power law part.

I don't just mean "the pay distribution is exponential". I mean any system where the rewards of the work (as judged by the people doing it) accrue primarily to a small fraction of the workers. This isn't about the size of the payout, it's about a system where competition and potentially ruthlessness within the labor force have substantial benefits. (Contrasted with careers like factory labor where getting 'ahead' of coworkers doesn't have much to offer.)

So for orchestras, "all musicians want to perform in the big orchestras, creating a highly competitive supply glut" aligns nicely with what I mean, even if that supply keeps salaries down. Most talented musicians don't make it into a career, most career musicians teach in schools or play weddings or otherwise don't make it to the Pops. Video game design is another power-law return - most people don't get to lead teams, most team leads don't make hit games. The same for mathematicians - the payouts are largely status, tenure, and prestigious institutions, but they're still exponentially distributed.

A decent definition would be any profession where the stereotypical example and the prototypical example are completely out of sync. The prototypical truck driver is basically what we imagine them to be. The prototypical software engineer works on an inventory system for a non-tech company someplace outside the Valley, and has nothing much in common with the 'techie' stereotype.

[moomin]

Even in banking people go out onto the street at lunchtime. The whole campus thing is pretty unique to SF tech culture.

[rayiner]

Bankers also ride the subway not private shuttle busses. It’s a stupid thing to focus on but optics matter.

[moomin]

I think the truly toxic thing is people not spending money in their communities. One of the things I pick up from anti-gentrification stories is that when new people move in, the existing shops lose customers. No-one goes to the corner store, they get food via an app or wait for a Whole Foods to open.

The (completely unintended) effect of this is that the existing community gets poorer, not richer, when rich people move in.

[neilk]

I think your analysis is great too. The power law advantages are what’s both wonderful and terrifying about this field.

Although surgeons aren’t really in the power-law game; at best they can do a handful of surgeries a week. But yes I chose that example specifically because many of them are tempermentally detached from people, get paid a lot, and are often workaholics. But we don’t see people revolting against surgeons.

[Bartweiss]

Sorry, I was a bit unclear on power law - I was thinking about the career side, not just the outcomes.

So power-law for surgeons would be doing the hardest surgeries in the highest-stakes fields, heading up a clinic, ending up rich and famous. A great brain surgeon doesn't save vastly more lives than an average one, but people like Ben Carson and Sanjay Gupta get exponentially more fame and status.

I think we agree though - it's a great example of a field with similar social dynamics to programming, and a very different societal role.