[tixocloud]

The way to eventually get towards ownership is through increasing your billings whereby the client is hiring the productive worker, at which point, it's usually when you become a partner of the company (effectively sharing in profits and losses).

The assumption that marketing, administration and sales work of business as non-productive is an arrogant view. While as engineers, we tend to think that doing the actual work counts more than the rest, clients actually value the other stuff and would be willing to pay much more for it as well. You can easily see this with enterprise contracts that value $25k to $1m or more, where they usually have account executives, project managers, training programs, etc. in addition to the product.

[Co_Reentry]

I think you misunderstood my intention. I (generally speaking) classify work as either productive or reproductive. In this case the productive work being the engineering and the reproductive being sales, marketing, admin, Etc. Both play very necessary and valid roles within any healthy business. I agree that some engineers have a myopic view of their function/role within an organization. I didn't mean for that comment to be self-aggrandizing at all.

> eventually get towards ownership is through increasing your billings whereby the client is hiring the productive worker, at which point, it's usually when you become a partner of the company (effectively sharing in profits and losses)

I think that this might not be considering the inherent politics of work and the power dynamics present in every business. To be clear, I don't think the comment is coming from a bad place, I just think that it points to a common fallacy that any sort of "meritocracy" is possible in business as usual. When you have a small group of people holding power there are few incentives for them to share that power. And In my experience it is the person who is able to sell themselves the best that gets the highest reward, not the most productive.

[tixocloud]

Apologies for misunderstanding your intention. Genuinely curious but what's your definition of 'reproductive' work?

> I think that this might not be considering the inherent politics of work and the power dynamics present in every business. To be clear, I don't think the comment is coming from a bad place, I just think that it points to a common fallacy that any sort of "meritocracy" is possible in business as usual. When you have a small group of people holding power there are few incentives for them to share that power. And In my experience it is the person who is able to sell themselves the best that gets the highest reward, not the most productive.

You're absolutely right and I see it with my experience as well. The highest rewards don't usually tend to fall naturally and equally to everyone whom we deem to be the most productive. And while there may be few incentives to share the power in small groups, one would hope that the goodness of an individual's heart would lead them to do so.