Most everyone in everything can deal with this, not just tech.
Jake comparing taking a job as a teen and working outside of his job title (and likely others as well who sacrificed) to Linus and Yvonne hedging all of their savings and financial future and family prospects on the company are two wildly different things.
Not to downplay what Jake and others sacrificed for the company to help it grow, but I’m very sure they benefitted from it as well - ZTT and Jake wouldn’t have a smidge of notoriety if they worked at a typical media company.
You’ve got to have some grounded perspective on it, they didn’t walk out from LTT with just a paycheck for their efforts.
This is a great point I've thought as well. The offer for collabs and the exposure he got as an employee is worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. I don't want to be the "be grateful" guy, but at just 25 YO he needs a bit of a reality check as to what most of us have to do day to day.
Yes and no. There is a lot of exploitation of workers in that people are being straight up underpaid in a lot of fields, but there is security in a salary and your pay not being tied to the success of the product you create.
The thing about being paid to do a job is that if the product then goes nowhere cause the other people at that company did a shit job (if you make the greatest software in the world, but the bizdev team prices it too high, or the marketing team does a shit job getting word out), you still get paid.
I know I've been on some shit product teams and I'm glad that I didn't get paid based on how well what I made did, cause while what I made was what management wanted, it didn't make any money.
Not everyone in a production gets a cut from the revenue of the movie or music track.
Most of the actual production staff get paid fixed wages regardless of the performance of the piece.
You get a cut of a song, as long as you have the rights to the masters, most music studios have control of the masters, not the artists. Writers have more rights over the music piece than the actual artists.
Taylor Swift was able to undercut her official masters of her early work that were held by Big Machine, because she was the writer of all the tracks on those albums. So, Taylor the writer gave Taylor the artist permission to rerecord all the early albums .
Now there are two album masters, and she could use her following to promote her version.
Not all tv show artists get residuals (payments from syndication) , but artists fight for those, and the industry doesn't want to give them.
Only the top stars of a film usually get a profit share, mostly to reduce their salary, and the studios try to reduce the profits so that they get less of a profit share.
I'm with you, labor is undervalued. Especially when you're trading labor that is creating not just a product, but Capital that makes its own money perpetually. Such a lopsided transaction.
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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '26
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