"If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year."
I'm not sure whether this was meant tongue-in-cheek or not, but ...
If someone's worth $80k to company X, they're worth $80k in the context of the value the provide to company working as part of the whole. At least some of the "corporate bullshit" is at least partially necessary to make the company run.
A developer "programming" outside the context of company X might be able to provide more value to a wider audience, but not without some level of "corporate bullshit" (legal, financial, etc). And they're not going to create $3m of directly accessible money without a decent amount of "corporate bullshit".
The same skills that are worth $80k to company X might have nearly $0 value to anyone outside the context of company X.
I think you are under estimating the stench of corporate bullshit. Take how ever bad you think it is and multiply it by 10 then add a little bit and it's worse than that at the really bad places.
Show me people that were $80k corp developers who left, did nothing else except the exact same things they did as corp devs (minus corp redtape) who made millions. No one does. To function, more stuff than just programming needs to happen.
Yes more stuff besides programming needs to happen but in a large corp. doing all those ancillary things takes a lot longer than it needs to. For example if you needed to buy a larger hard drive for your dev machine as an individual you can just go to your favorite online retailer order it and have it in a day or two. At a large company you would have to deal with a litany of people forms and other nonsense that could stretch on for weeks if not months. If you've never experienced it you can't possibly imagine how bad it really is.
I have experienced it (event got yelled at at company X for upgrading my computer to 1g from 512m - just bought a 512meg chip at lunch for about $40). I still don't think that just being able to replace your own drive and such will allow someone to generate 10+ times their previous value. I'm not intentionally trivializing your point of view - we'll just have to agree to disagree. :)
I'm not sure whether this was meant tongue-in-cheek or not, but ...
If someone's worth $80k to company X, they're worth $80k in the context of the value the provide to company working as part of the whole. At least some of the "corporate bullshit" is at least partially necessary to make the company run.
A developer "programming" outside the context of company X might be able to provide more value to a wider audience, but not without some level of "corporate bullshit" (legal, financial, etc). And they're not going to create $3m of directly accessible money without a decent amount of "corporate bullshit".
The same skills that are worth $80k to company X might have nearly $0 value to anyone outside the context of company X.