> "you're lucky you even have a job; shut up and stop complaining"
You probably have seen the dotcom crash yourself - there were a lot of developers feeling lucky to even have a job. There probably will be another IT bubble burst, and a lot of people will regret they did not form a union when they had at least some say in the matter.
> I wish there was a way that we could apply our skills toward fixing this injustice.
Educate yourself on why does that happen. Main purpose of every company is to make money. As long as IT is making a lot of money programmers will be paid a lot. As soon as industry starts to cool down - our salaries will drop as well.
Indonesian 12 y.o. who makes Nike sneakers for 1$ a day will probably disagree. Humanity as a whole have made tremendous advancements in medicine, engineering and agriculture, technology as a whole have been advancing in giant leaps, yet benefits of those advancements are largely felt by 10-20 countries and 3-5% of the population. Even in the US some people cannot afford insulin and other types of basic healthcare. Workers's wages are stagnant for the past 50 years, while their productivity was steadily rising (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...).
> And now we have the mechanisms for almost anybody to get out of it. I grew up very poor
Survivorship bias, "if I've made it, then anyone can".
> nearly feral generation of children that almost collapsed the country
Care to provide a source? We have kindergartens that accept children as young as 1.5 y.o, older kids (3+) typically stay at kindergarten for 8 hours a day.
Because you don't write a lot of code on paper? Working with text (for notes or prose) is very different than working with code.
You don't think "I need to correct that thing located 23 words forward so I use 23w or press w 23 times" - you position your hand and make a correction.
It's not just raw input speed - writing on paper allows you to quickly jump around the text, making small corrections, adding notes/symbols/drawings, etc.
Worker productivity has been steadily increasing for the past century, but wages stopped growing in the 70s-80s. No amount of corporate compensation can compensate for that.
I've seen similar statements before, and it is a major point in Lockhart's Lament. I wonder if only people who are both good mathematicians and good teachers can pull off teaching mathematics as a language.
Capitalism is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (people, who control the wealth and means of production - factories, companies, banks). They dictate their will to the proletariat (people working for wage who have no control over how business is run and how profits of their labor are sold), via press/TV/government/police-military actions/lobbying/family ties; many are directly working for the government.
Socialism happens when proletariat becomes the ruling class and distributes the wealth upon all the citizens of the country, providing healthcare, education, housing, enough wage to feed everyone. As proletariat are the majority, socialism becomes a proper democracy, where people can control their own livelihood, not some fat senator who received a 100k 'lobbying gift'.
Communism happens when all the signs of the capitalism vanish (no exploitation of people by other people, no money - goods are produced based on needs and distributed to everyone). It happens when people get rid of bourgeoisie thinking via education and personal experience of having society without hungry, homeless, uneducated people. This happened before (we see slave-owning societies of the past with disgust and feudal states with horror), it just took over several hundred years each time.
> This is in part because the risk was not shared equally.
Developer joining a startup risks almost as much as a founder. He leaves his existing job for a promise of a salary, and if this startup fails - is left without a job, and possibly, without a salary either. This happened to me, and I was paid for first 2 months out of 6 I worked there.
> The investors and others who put in money or time and energy for little or not pay
Investors still have most of their money, I am left without a job, unable to pay my mortgage and possibly buy food.
Imagine this: I put $X, you put $Y into an investment. If investment is successful, I get a 100$, you get $Y+$X-$100. If it is not, we both get nothing. Would you consider this investment fair? No sane person would put a money into an investment fund, expecting a fixed value in return, but employer-employee relations are exactly that.