Well said. I’ve always also thought that writing code and craftsmanship is a forced metaphor. At most, the product is the craft, not the code. And a product is exactly as good as people’s experiences of using it and how well it solves their problems. The underlying code quality is correlated with these things, but let’s be honest a badly designed product that doesn’t meet the customers needs can have PERFECT code and zero tech debt and still be a bad product because of it.

Also you know what, some code is disposable. Sure, we all want to craft amazing sculptures of metaphorical beautiful wooden chairs that will last a lifetime, but sometimes what the customer needs is a stack of plastic chairs, cheap, and done next week. Who cares if they break after like 1 year.

So, sometimes when I accept that my boss wants something rushed through, I don’t complain about the tech debt it’ll cause, I don’t fight back about how it should’ve designed to have wonderful code… not because I have no pride in my work, but because I understand the businesses needs.

And sometimes the business just wants you to make plastic chairs.

> Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

TLDR: survivorship

The typically large farms with nice houses were making reasonable money, and in a lot of places, only the house remains of the farm. My old neighborhood was a large farm, subdived into about 1000 postage stamp lots around 1900; the owner's house got a slightly larger lot and stuck around as your mansion.

The small farms that were within the means of more people tended to have shanty houses and those have not persisted. If the farm is still a farm, it's likely been subsumed into a larger plot.

> Look at the farms that still have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.

If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.

I think it’s pretty dependent on where you farmed. Orchards in California being vastly more profitable than like North Dakota.

Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there. The small/bad/ugly/whatever houses are gone.

> It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

> farming was insanely lucrative during that time

That is wildly inaccurate. Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had?

Farm labor paid significantly less than industrialized labor at the time. I suspect in addition to just making things up, you're looking at a few landowners who were quite wealthy due to their land holdings (and other assets) and what they have left behind while completely ignoring the lives led by the vast majority of farmers at the time.

I would wager that the general change in availability of wood is by far the biggest driver in difference for the markets you are describing?

Particularly, furniture benefits greatly from hard wood. At least, the furniture that is old that you are likely to see. It also benefits heavily from being preserved, not used.

Comparing a cheap thing to an expensive thing is absurd.

The appropriate comparison is which is better for the same price

At age 62, I'm wondering which mythical decade did not alienate software developers?

There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...

> But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile"

Lol are you really gonna go with "I'm a software developer, fuck all the restaurant workers, teachers, plumbers, janitors!"

This is why Marx's ideas failed in the West - toxic individualism - and flourished in the East.

> one single sentiment

Lol alienation of labor is not a single "sentiment" - it's a core principle. So like it or not you share a core principle with Marx.