[sh34r]

That model is not all sunshine and roses either. Wages were a concession sought by labor in the Industrial Revolution because piecework was considered to be worse. Gig work revived all those old problems for a new Gilded Age.

All these problems are coming about because software doesn't fit nicely into any of the traditional arrangements. We really fit in more as consultants external to the business, but the software consulting industry as it exists today is corrupted by the perverse incentives of generating billable hours and essentially scamming clients.

I'd like to see the emergence of software partnerships modeled after law firms, where engineers are owners and not employees. The problem is, tech is currently dominated by criminal monopolists who regularly collude to drive wages down in violation of numerous laws. Musk and his PayPal mafia buddies are running the same racket right now, that Apple and Google were convicted of 10 years ago. They would simply refuse to work with any tech worker co-ops, because they have monopsony power over our labor, and they can just lobby Congress for more H1-Bs.