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Role Model

I happened to meet a couple of small business owners at a Friendsgiving. They are CEOs too but a very far cry from Elon Musk whom they grudgingly admired for his widely publicized down-sizing moves at Twitter. Their opinion (which I have also heard and read elsewhere) is that as the CEO, Musk needed to make the company more productive and there was simply no sense in having an engineering staff that size to run a silly social media platform that is not even so useful. 

There is this smooth blending of facts, conjecture and opinion that when coming from a long time business owner, an average person may very well pay heed to. One of the two complained about his former sales people that simply refused to go above and beyond responding to inbound requests from customers - they inserted themselves into the money flow and collected their commissions. They did what was easy but were incapable of bringing in new business. They were all fired over time - his only regret was that he did not act sooner. 

Musk in his opinion has problems incomparably bigger than his but it comes down to the same thing - people are overcompensated for jobs that they are severely underperforming at, so cuts absolutely need to be made. The other small business owner was in complete agreement with this sentiment. Around the room people could largely agree tech jobs paid outsized salaries even though tech is getting more and more commoditized. 

Barely any art or craft is needed to churn out code - to that end the inflated salaries make no sense. Pizza making and writing micro-services should earn a person about the same paycheck. College degrees are fairly irrelevant for a developer - I am a strong opinion on this one but decided to hold my peace. Notwithstanding, being from the tech industry myself, I have to same there is some truth to what everyone was saying there. Whether that is the whole, complete and universal truth is a very different matter but this is the conversation people are having after too much to eat and drink and having had a crazy year upto now, not to mention the pandemic for a couple of years before that. They are allowed to vent. 

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