It's clearly not a serious comment, and I say this as someone who thinks there should be more workers' cooperatives in the tech industry.

I was and still am entirely serious. I don’t know you and doubt that you and I have ever said three words to each other. What’s your basis for your claim to clearly know my intent?

The article author works for a company that has 54 open positions. Thousands of capable developers will or have already read his article. Why can he not talk about how great it is to be a developer at his company? Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Also, if you are an engineer that can save your company millions of dollars in real life, that’s worth something, isn’t it? You won’t get paid for it unless you have the courage to ask hard questions.

Your experience will obviously be different than mine. But please don’t pretend that you know me, or what I’m thinking when I offer a comment. It would be much better to show up with curiosity rather than condescension.

I wish you well.

Condescension is bad, but disingenuously affected curiosity is worse. I put it to you that your tone here makes it very clear that your original comment was not actually sincere and you were far from "curious". You're not doing your cause any favours.

Thanks for this comment, the reply from lmm made me doubt if I was misreading the situation. Now I'm glad I wrote what I did.

I interpreted that as Imm correctly identifying my comment as a joke.

Regardless of how sincere the original post was, my comment was very obviously (to me, at least) a swipe at the morally bankrupt world we inhabit and the fact that a company doing this of their own volition right now feels absurd - not a dig at the idea itself.

To the original point - I tend to agree with people elsewhere in the thread saying this particular idea is infeasible and ignores the behind-the-scenes contributions of other staff. I am however very much in favour of the related concept of making employee ownership mandatory in certain situations (think anything on a major stock exchange). In that scenario, the cost savings would "trickle down" to all employees.