This is all so ridiculous. Easy to throw out fat salaries to do meaningless stuff all day when you're playing with funny money (everyone has to look busy to keep selling the story to investors).

We haven't even figured out a way to get people from home to work quickly and efficiently in Silicon Valley but people are working on maximizing the earning potential of your coffee machine.

    We haven't even figured out a way to get people from
    home to work quickly and efficiently in Silicon Valley

I'd say there is a rational reason for this. If the cost of living was lower in the SFBA, salaries would likely be lower. By creating remote working technology or attitudes, an engineer would almost be working towards lowering their own salary (effectively allowing their jobs to be intra-country-outsourced to lower cost of living areas).

There are lots of engineers who would be willing to work towards decreasing cost of living, even if it decreases their salary.

I certainly would. I don't really care if my salary goes down by 10 percent if I massively help make the world a better place.

And there are lots of engineers for whom working remotely would increase their salary, however it decreased the cost for their employees. If anything, I'd say that (on a global scale) economic incentives are firmly on the side of solving the remote working problem rather then perpetuating it.

I don't disagree with the grandparent: there are people who would do it, but I think for engineers right now the incentives are aligned against it.

And I agree with you, for employers it's definitely in their interests, they just need to get over the inertia of "bums in seats means work is getting done".

How about a 50% salary cut for a marginal improvement? Just curious at what point you care more about your own well being versus the well being of others.

It would actually be the opposite effect. If I found a way to cut developer costs in half I would become fabulously wealthy, not poor.

Why wouldn't someone want to both become rich by putting devs out of a job and making the world better?

Maybe due to misplaced loyalty, and so as to screw over the rest of society To Help a small rich group?

It's so stupid. Obviously you'd have the espresso machine in a central location and deliver the product by drone, not haul the machines around. Idiots!

Why? Obviously, you'd have the drone be the coffee machine. The time between customers is spent brewing, and then it lands over your mug and squirts it in from its abdomen, like a giant coffee-from-abdomen spewing insect that flies from flower to flower.

Anything is possible: "After you read the New York Times over breakfast, a drone comes to pick it up, and you resell it as a fire starter."

drone : service-economy :: pickaxe : gold-rush

I'm looking for X, in

X : service-economy :: jeans : gold-rush

Because it turned out that lots of people liked having tough, reliable pants that had been proven to work by people using them all the time, and later there was lots of room for diversification.

There's not much profit in pickaxes once the gold-rush wears off.

Jeans were an actual innovation, if you sold pickaxes in a gold rush, you were basically running a glorified 7-11.

But getting rich selling jeans during a gold rush requires luck, you have to already have the skill to sew before you go out West. Otherwise you're just like every schmoe out there looking to get rich. If you get out there and realize there's big money to be made in jeans, then by the time you're ready to compete effectively the opportunity to generate outsized returns is already gone.

The people who typically get rich during gold rushes already have 10 years of experience doing the thing they got rich doing, and they got there first. You need both foresight, the capability to be where you are needed when you're needed there and not after the big money has already been made, and luck, the happenstance of already having the skills that were needed.

Foresight can be learned, but luck can't be controlled.

The X was smart phones. Unfortunately, Apple and Samsung made all the money there.

For my Espresso machine it's going to be a Sikorsky CH-53 drone ;) These are heavy buggers.

Would a MCT-Nissan Roto-Drone work?