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This is all a very fluffy way to say “yes, most revenue in software development comes from marketing.”
So I’m glad we agree. Though calling the laptop class “elite” is always funny wish fulfillment from rationalists whose greatest achievement in life is becoming middle managers for a tech company. The “elite” don’t work.
Okay, I disagree on that, but it has nothing to do with whatever the original topic was.
Like, if your employer makes billions in revenue from hundreds of millions of people browsing the web, buying subscriptions, or clicking ads, and you can save them recurring millions per year in compute costs in a few months of work - you might be worth a few hundred k per year. Or if you can be 1/100th of the team that develops new products that have a shot at making $XXXM/year, or if you can optimize ad targeting to increase ad revenue by $XM/year, or ... etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'coming from marketing'. If you mean ad revenue, then ... yeah, a lot of software revenue comes from that. (But the value that makes users willing to look at the ads is mostly tangential - if i'm on /r/cars, I see an ad for shoes, and the money the shoe company pays reddit pays for a software dev who improves the reliability of /r/cars, "marketing" kinda paid for that dev, but they're still doing, and being usefully compensated for, non-marketing work).
This doesn't need to be a moral defense of the laptop elite. They can still be doing bad things. But sometimes bad things rest on solid economic foundations. Even if you want to destroy or murder the laptop class or w/e, it's useful to understand how it actually works.
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