"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 am not sure though that it is false. It is just not very well defined. (I don't know what it means. What actionable advice can be concluded from it.) You say wealth is different than money. This implies that wealth cannot be measured with the money you can gain from it. But you somehow measure wealth with money. You somehow convert between the two using the ratio used at big companies.
What can be said in my opinion is this:
At a big company you are paid 100.000 per year to improve someone else's huge shitty code. You are paid to fight with buerocracy. You are paid well for it.
In a small company you are paid to create new programs fast. Much faster than in big companies. But this small company either has huge risks or have much smaller income than the big company. You programming does not worth more just because you can create more lines of code or nicer code. Your programming here also worth only $100.000
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I read you as you stated that the expected value of the earning of a programmer founded startup is 36x$80.000
I think it is more close to 2x$80.000
The 2 multiplier comes from you work 2x more time in a week.
In a small company you are paid to create new programs fast. Much faster than in big companies. But this small company either has huge risks or have much smaller income than the big company.
It sounds like what you're saying is that although you may be able to get code written (and thus wealth created) faster in a small company, you don't automatically get paid in proportion.
If that's what you're saying, I agree, and in fact I said so later in the same essay:
"The other catch is that the payoff is only on average proportionate to your productivity. There is, as I said before, a large random multiplier in the success of any company. So in practice the deal is not that you're 30 times as productive and get paid 30 times as much. It is that you're 30 times as productive, and get paid between zero and a thousand times as much. If the mean is 30x, the median is probably zero."
"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 am not sure though that it is false. It is just not very well defined. (I don't know what it means. What actionable advice can be concluded from it.) You say wealth is different than money. This implies that wealth cannot be measured with the money you can gain from it. But you somehow measure wealth with money. You somehow convert between the two using the ratio used at big companies.
What can be said in my opinion is this:
At a big company you are paid 100.000 per year to improve someone else's huge shitty code. You are paid to fight with buerocracy. You are paid well for it.
In a small company you are paid to create new programs fast. Much faster than in big companies. But this small company either has huge risks or have much smaller income than the big company. You programming does not worth more just because you can create more lines of code or nicer code. Your programming here also worth only $100.000
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I read you as you stated that the expected value of the earning of a programmer founded startup is 36x$80.000
I think it is more close to 2x$80.000 The 2 multiplier comes from you work 2x more time in a week.
But of course I have no data to back it up.