It seems fairly self-explanatory - the oversupply is of individual human workers, not some product. The individual at the bottom of the pyramid is hurt directly. A large business is treating a specific human at the bottom with disrespect. The name of the economic principle at play is morally irrelevant.

I.e. economic shrewdness is not equivalent to morality.

I think everything you read is true, but also I think speaks to the overabundance of supply.

To put this in a different light - people (here among all places) are especially sick of firms like Accenture/IBM/etc. of loading up projects with unexperienced junior people and putting absurd markup on their services. Which one do people want? Paying for soccer teams full of inexperienced people learning on the job or promising inexperienced person experience and exposure as compensation for their services?

For the record - I'm speaking about this from the perspective of market dynamics, not regulations/morality. I personally think a co like Netflix is in the wrong here.

It sounds like you're offering a choice between paying nothing but exposure or paying just as much as for the most senior experts.

If someone is less good, pay them less, but still a living wage. If they're not worth that much, and you don't want to train them to be worth that much, then don't hire them.

But that's all assuming the price of a contract is roughly proportional to the cost to implement it. Any "absurd markup" is a totally different issue.

> people (here among all places) are especially sick of firms like Accenture/IBM/etc. of loading up projects with unexperienced junior people and putting absurd markup on their services

Are people sick of the inexperienced teams, or are they sick of being scammed? IIRC, that business model usually starts with a bait-and-switch - they company will send their best people first, to make an impression and get the client to sign the contract, and then switch the project over to the cheapest team.

The reason I put Atos on my blacklist is experiencing a case where their contracted support was so bad, I had to do things twice - first I had to do what they should do, then design a step-by-step document that graphically showed each button to click (essentially "programming the person") and send that to them...

After escalations, they finally noticed client got angry and suddenly there was someone skilled at the other end. But I suspect it was exception and only for a short time.

Because exploiting people is wrong.

Can you elaborate how this is exploiting?

I am a SWE engineer with photography as a hobby.

If a tv show contacted me to do a wedding shoot, I'd be excited for the coverage and I wouldn't feel exploited since doing shoots is fun for me.

I could see how there are parallels to the "background actor" industry where, by law, you have to pay all of the talent on screen, even if its a nominal amount and the actor would of worked for free.

But that doesn't the case here?

I hope you can see the difference between doing something for free when it's your hobby, vs. doing something for free when it's your career.

If a TV show contacted you do create a web app, would you do that work for free? Would you give up other opportunities to get paid to do so?

> If a TV show contacted you do create a web app, would you do that work for free? Would you give up other opportunities to get paid to do so?

So, say no? (I've done that a couple of times in similar situations.)

> would you do that work for free?

No, because it is not fulfilling.

I do use my career skills to teach under privileged students how to program for free.

I totally agree.

I too have a photography hobby (or did, pre-kids). I release everything I do that's any good via Creative Commons attribution-only licenses. My pics have shown up on articles in USA Today, Forbes, Yahoo Finance, and many many other places. Plus they are in a number of free and paid wallpaper apps. People sell prints of them on Amazon. I can go buy a cup with one of my photos on it right now. I was even interviewed for a small Discovery Channel video.

I think it's awesome. As long as they stick my name on there and follow the terms of the license, more power to them.

I've had people (especially in the local photographer's club) tell me that I'm being horrible and helping to kill the professional photography industry etc. But in my view there is just nothing wrong with giving away your creative output in exchange for credit.

Because you're a hobbyist and there's probably no chance in hell they'd contact you. This is this persons job and they look to be a professional. But imagine if Google or Microsoft or <insert whatever tech co> decided to ask you to do a software project for them for no money but you'd get exposure, would you do it? If so, I have a shit ton of work that I'll give you while collecting my salary and give you "exposure"...

Big organizations do that all the time. They call them hackathons.

They also have OSS projects like ES that accept free labor

The opportunity is worth a lot of future business.

Do you think people get paid when they give a radio interview? They are using the radio as a platform for selling.

Many professionals--yes, including developers doing something on the side in open source projects--can have a lot of different motivations. Yes, in some cases, doing free stuff is at least loosely connected to what they're paid for. But, especially in the case, of people like business and technology consultants, they'll often speak at a conference for free depending upon their business model and other choices.

People should be paid a living wage for their work.

There's an oversupply of humans but murder is still wrong. Treating people poorly is still treating people poorly, regardless of justification. You can't treat an oversupply of people the same way you treat an oversupply of goods. It's why we have minimum wage laws and other (insufficient) worker protections.