> Their robber baron behavior reveals their true values and the reality of capitalism.
This is rather reductionist… By your same logic I could say that Stalin and Mao revealed the true values and reality of communism.
Let’s not elaborate on it further though and just leave this as a simple argument. Free market capitalism has led us to the most prosperous, peaceful, and advanced society humanity has ever ventured to create. Communism threatened that prosperity and peace with atrocities on a scale that exists beyond human comprehension. Capitalism, even with all of its faults, is the obvious choice.
It's rather strawman to bring up communism in a conversation that talked nothing about it, except that Capitalism is clearly flawed.
Capitalism without law ends up with the same kind of authoritariasm as communism without law. Some Rich Guy ends up telling everyone what to do as a ruler with loose rules that no longer resemble the economic model. That's what people complain about when they bring up terms like "late stage capitalism".
What's interesting is the speaker in the poem is predicting their own inevitable ("with a sigh") reality distortion field, i.e. is being cynical about themself. So it is a poem about self-serving bias, despite the fact that we are perfectly capable of checking ourselves. Our biases aren't entirely subconscious. We can be willful about it, willfully look the other way so our biases remain "subconscious" and thus not our responsibility, making it easier for our conscious side to convince itself that its self-esteem is legit.
And then there is a meta-confirmation of this bias: The way people commonly interpret this poem. If Frost had that in mind all along, then he/the poem is genius.
I think it depends on how it is done, and the kind of ICs you have on the team. It can come off as micromanagement, which may work well enough if you have not-so-competent ICs, but will backfire if you have talented ones.
I've found it really helpful to be a support programmer. not someone that takes on big tasks. nothing with a hard deadline. not something that someone else needs to do their work. leftover cleanup. testing. minor refactoring. build.
you need to keep your hand in the game just to understand what's going on with the codebase. but you're not an a-list player here.
> It can come off as micromanagement, which may work well enough if you have not-so-competent ICs, but will backfire if you have talented ones.
Yep agreed - I've seen a couple of managers that were probably fine as developers but struggled (to their extreme detriment) with being pretty average compared to the senior developers that they were managing. Their 'helpful advice' just served to show how superficial their understandings of the systems were.
On a daily basis here on HN, capitalists and libertarians and others with the SV mindset work hard to protect the narrative that their way is the best way.
Combined with the willingness to exploit those two things to hoard as much as you can, without qualms about taking advantage of cheap goods and cheap labor even from those who work as hard as you but get less because of economic/power/freedom asymmetries, without concern for the Mathews Effect (that wealth breeds wealth, that poverty breeds poverty)...
If your are willing to look at capitalism and free markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral that the value of a person be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie even as others who because of birth circumstance get the thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will find that material success (success as defined by capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned does screw someone over.
Such a person will have a different definition of success: A life of contribution to the community done out of love and morality, not a coerced transaction leveraging one's advantages against those with less.
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[1]: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair
This is a classic midwit criticism of capitalism that assumes zero sum.
You can sell services and goods that boost productivity and the alternative is just the status quo that produces waste. Someone that creates a successful business doing something productive is not inherently evil because of capitalism.
