Ah, the standard phrase used when people try to get you to work against your interests.

The rest of your post amounts to: "Doing the imprudent thing X worked out for me this one time, so everyone should do it."

Yes, it's called "fraud".

There are plenty of companies that manage their work in a way that minimizes the human component and maximizes the technical utility of their engineers (judged on productive output alone), almost in a way that makes the human component and all it brings with it (unreliability, politicking, emotional outbursts, backstabbing, you name it) irrelevant. In fact, my ideal company reduces face time to close to zero, because that's the only reliable way to eliminate politicians, bad actors and people who try to game the system using social skills and emotional manipulation. A nice side effect of remote work is that it automatically creates that sort of environment, unless you go out of your way to change that (but then the remote work model is probably not for you).

>renders you to be a piece of quite primitive carbon-based technology.

The fact that you don't know how to manage engineers in an entirely meritocratic, non-political environment, says more about your management abilities than anything else.

Ultimately, if people want to renege, they will renege. Unless you have a ton of money and energy to throw at lawsuits, it's better to structure your deals in a way that clips your potential downside (e.g. work on a retainer basis, don't accept stocks in lieu of cash etc).

As a counterargument, I've seen a few people turn into complete monsters once their kids were born. Their justification was "I have kids now and I'll do literally anything for my family, fuck everyone else and their needs." (paraphrased). It's all fine and dandy until the instinct for survival kicks in.

To me, my consciousness is my identity (myself). The body is just a vessel for it, and once it craps out, and takes the consciousness down with it, I couldn't care less about my DNA (a bit of a tautology, but you get the idea).

In other words, they'd really need to pay me a lot more than an established company in order to offset my risk.

Many experienced engineers I know feel the same.

Furthermore, statistics show that there is a positive correlation between companies rewarding executives in a bull market, and punishing executives holding the exact same positions in a declining market, thereby making luck and timing, not skill, a main determinant of who eventually makes money (the correlation between how well a company performs and the perceived skill of its executives was determined to be around 10-20%).

He mentioned he works in finance. That whole industry is very hierarchical and based around strict pecking orders (and lots of koolaid drinking to boot). In many firms, you are always just "one project away" from being promoted or made partner.

Having a single state-sanctioned business (and therefore backed by the threat of violence) is somehow less monopolistic than having a free market where the best service provider is rewarded by becoming the most popular and profitable one?

Every inflationary currency system suffers from the same problem. At least bitcoin has a hard cap on the total number of units that will ever be available.

So just like any other currency and commodity then? Intrinsic value doesn't exist. Everything is relative to where you are and what you're trying to achieve.

Curb your hubris and start treating people like human beings. I've worked for a number of "world changing" startups managed by 20-something year olds like you and the fact that it always devolved into a high school popularity contest made me sick to my stomach.