The silent majority in software

Well… many of those tools are written while building those critical systems and scale, so they may include both the learnings as well as the mistakes. And, frankly, most people aren’t building things that are critical or require scale (no matter what they say to make their work sound interesting).

Throughout human history someone being wealthy almost always meant someone else being exploited - from obvious chattel slavery to less obvious trading networks

That these exploitations often created empires that created institutions that themselves promoted higher efficiency in trade (like protecting from piracy and brigands) was a good thing. But trade, whilst always a win win, can be and for empires always was structured to win more towards the centre of the empire

This structural inequality is found everywhere. In strong and weak forms. A weak form is commonly known - wealthy people "cheat" to get their kids into MIT or Harvard, (or even being wealthy is a cheat) and then the networks formed their help with access to resources later (see VC funds two kids from MIT with idea for ...)

Strong examples of structural inequality are found in say the Russian Federations army where the head of the armed forces has multiple houses and yachts and oddly the conscripts are fighting on a dollar a day and often come from rural impoverished areas.

None of this your fault.

But we choose our structures, our institutions in the same way we choose our built environments. If we have Houston-like 20 lane highways with nose to nose traffic when we could have please t walkable cities with electric trams and steeet cafes then yeah, none of that is the fault of the people in the traffic jams.

But it was a choice. A choice made in these cases in a democracy.

And we just assume that if people were given informed choices they would not have gone "hell yeah 20 lane highway".

So the solution to bad structures, bad institutions, bad urban environments is democracy. Is people making their voices heard and choices being made that are the informed choices people want (I assume most people will vote for "more equal")

Yet the next step is a leap of faith. Faith in democracy and human intelligence

The networks will work to keep themselves in power and are a centralising force (gather more power to self)

but human wealth now depends not on control of land but intelligent use of excess energy and political stability

So does someone have wealth today? That's nice. Is the structure of how they got it a fair one? Is it right that someone who has capital today should continue to direct the use of that capital? Is it fair that a founder gets 80% of the shares but the first engineer gets 1%? I know it was a trade but capitalism is structured like the above empires were structured - to benefit the capital city.

Is that the only way to structure the allocation of resources in the planet?

The use of coal and oil has seen an outrageous chnage in human wealth. Fantastic. And the conditions for that industrial revolution are so weird that tinkering with it seems so risky. but the two world wars showed that it is a fairly robust revolution- and if we want to get out from the oil / CO2 trap and into a sustainable future we need to overcome bad resource allocation - it's time to try new options. Private Companies are undemocratic and control about 50% of western wealth, is a hierarchy like that the best way to allocate and motivate resources? Most western nations are highly centralised - does that make for th best local decisions?

There are options

This is why those that benefit from the current status quo are trying to dismantle and destroy education, right? We can't let the people read, know, or think about what you wrote. It's destabilizing and "dangerous" to their way of life.

Requirements aren't really that. They're really wish lists.

Such a shame, since this is ‘a great way’ to dissuade women[1].

[1]: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...

If you do your day job for your employer with total dedication then you are not likely to 'need' to post public repos or get involved in slagging off different programming trends. Plus you have already heard what people have to say about your toolset and you know they know little about your domain expertise.

No word of a lie, a few years ago a 'crypto' person told me that all the code I was working exceptionally hard at was a complete waste of time. Blockchain technology would solve everything. I just had to wait. And I am still waiting!

I have a lot to show for the work I have done since that conversation with buttons I have put online getting clicked millions of times with nobody personally thanking me. It is 'silent majority' code. No idea where the 'crypto' person got, I stick to my own lane and I don't need to rubber-neck.

Although it is good to share one's work so nobody else has to reinvent the wheel, if I have a better solution and I have developed it in the context of dedication to the day job, then that software gives a commercial advantage to my employer. Even if the core of the idea is mine and that I developed it in my own time, I 'bat' for my employer, and, if it is in their interests to keep the repo private, then I will.

There is also the matter of peer review. My colleagues are too busy to spend time on my pet projects.

The 'crypto' person has one of those LinkedIn profiles where they have more than the maximum amount of connections, with all kinds of grand job titles and the rest of it. I am just a programmer and I do not need a job title. I don't even need LinkedIn and I do not spend time inventing a grander version of myself online.

For code samples I can share the code that I worked on, albeit removing any business logic that is not mine to share. In my niche, with recruiters that know me, this 'just show me the code' works fine.

What if everyone worked like me? There would be no fine repos to plunder!!! Well, there are a few pull requests I have put into public repos and the majority of the population cannot say that. Plus, if I spend two decades silently writing code, then, one day, post a repo, it is going to be good.

To be honest the code I was writing two years ago makes me cringe with shame at how naive it is, so I doubt that my efforts from before that would have been for the wider public good, even if they did fix a business problem at the time. I have sometimes had to get working code rather than beautifully refactored code, then onto the next project.