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Re:Universal basic income to be tested in Wales by imtringued on Saturday May 15, 2021 @11:55AM (#27166329)
>How many folks are essentially creating CRUD apps of dubious value all day long and lying to themselves that what they provide is of great value to society simply because it is compensated well?

Well, I thought about it, my employer wants a CRUD app but is it really necessary? Is there no other way to do it? I mean, if they had to pay Silicon Valley wages it would not be very easy to justify paying that much, so it boils down to why the employer wants the CRUD app, not how much you are being paid.

Well, the first potential reason would be that it is 100% superfluous and the employer is just following a CRUD app trend and doesn't want to miss out. I somehow doubt that this is the case but things are never black and white. In this case the wage is arbitrarily high or low.

The second potential reason is that the CRUD app is replacing an alternative, presumably the problem the CRUD app is solving has to be solved and if it is not done via a CRUD app it would be done manually by office workers. The CRUD app therefore saves my employer the cost of hiring more data entry people for example. I find this to be likely. I can crank out 3 CRUD apps per year. Assuming all three CRUD apps combined increase productivity enough to cut one data entry job (technically they were never hired in the first place) and the app is good for 3 years that means I can charge up to 3 years of salary for one year of work. The benefit to society is that people don't have to waste their life on trivial problems.

The third potential reason is that the CRUD app is the only way to solve the problem, essentially the CRUD app lets us solve a problem that is otherwise impossible to solve. In this case compensation depends entirely on how much income solving the problem brings in and thus my wage is bounded by that income. In this case the wage could be arbitrary as well but it would be tied to solving a problem. I consider this a significant driver of wages in Silicon Valley but the CRUD apps I am writing are not in this category. The benefit to society is that the problem has been solved at all.

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