Now do startups. But seriously, while I have not got to investment stage, I have been in shitty bands in the early 90s where I know the names of the people in the article, had partners in the model-acting-whatever game, written as a freelancer and lived with authors and publishing people, and then also worked on hopeful startup products for myself and others, and even sometimes help VCs choose decks from the slop pile. It's the
exact same grind across all those industries.
Reality is, you are either money side, or talent side, and there is almost nothing in between, other than the "judas goat" roles of the A&R guy, writing course adjunct, model scout, VC associate, where you get a job bringing talent into the funnel.
If you thought your dev job was different, your recruiter is probably getting compensated with 20-30% of your first year's salary if you persist in the job for 6mos, and if you are in the contracting game without negotiation skills or leverage, the company you work for is paying anywhere from 20% to 100% premium to your agency where you do work, an they did their work.
Around the time of this article in my late teens or early 20s I was sitting beside a pool at the vast country estate of a friends very wealthy parents, and I asked him, "How do I get this?" He told me something along the lines of "the reason you don't make any money is because you want money for what it gets you, like freedom, approval, acknowledgement of your talent, status, appreciation, and maybe some nicer versions of what you need to live. You don't actually want money, you don't make it for its own sake, and you don't use it or manage it to make more of it, you use it for these other things." I responded, "Of course, why would I want to be a slave to making money? What an empty life. I don't want to be some douche bag bridge and tunnel tourist working at a bank." He said, "If you want this, you need to only want that. You don't get this from what money gets."
The lecture didn't land at all. I was always a bit of a punk ass. I went on to do some really interesting stuff, where decades later I make a passable living having done some interesting and even legendary things I get to dine out on the stories from, but while I don't have many regrets, I am conscious of the attitude in this article and how it plays out. If you want money, make money. if you want something else, own that. Thinking you're going to be wealthy from your talent and efforts is practically the definition of magical thinking. Money is made by managing it, which means getting some, leveraging and investing it and extracting value from the risk and growth.
There's nothing wrong with not being wealthy, I do it very well, but attributing our ignorance about money to injustice, as a way to protect our magical thinking about the untested value of our talent, is to be stuck in a kind of adolescence.