Philosophies for Software Engineers
Please don&#x27;t let things like &quot;Apple makes $1.8MM per employee&quot; get to you. It leads to stupid decision-making. Yes, the company is making more money on your efforts than it is paying you. It&#x27;s called business, you take inputs and add value to them and sell them to other people who will turn around and do the same thing. If you had capital to throw into a business venture then you&#x27;d do it too.<p>I met a guy a few weeks ago who&#x27;d moved over from California. He wanted to learn how to code, and told me his story. He was a business sort who went into business with a software developer. The dev did good work, and the business guy managed to get it funded. Just when things started picking up, the dev decided he wasn&#x27;t getting enough of the pie and bailed, destroying the entire enterprise. He wanted to learn how to code so that this wouldn&#x27;t happen to him again.<p>So I&#x27;m giving him an hour or so a week to show him how web development works so that he can code a prototype himself. Then he can get funded and hire employees rather than deal with the emotional vagaries of software developers. I don&#x27;t blame him at all.<p>Business guys are typically going to make more money than the coders are, it&#x27;s pointless to fight this. The better route is to go into business yourself and capture the value yourself. The reason is that the business side is the human side, and humans are harder to deal with, ultimately, than computers are. Also, humans have money and computers do not.