Agatha Christie once said she was too poor to afford servants and too rich to afford a car. The speaker uses this paradox to argue that what's cheap and what's expensive flip over time. Today engineers earn more than service workers, but that hierarchy might reverse in tech.
So there's an old story I heard about Agatha Christie where she said she could never imagine being so poor as to not be able to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford an automobile. And of course, here we are a century later and I'd be saying that's perverse, right? Everyone, at least in the first world, can afford a car. And the idea of hiring a servant seems absolutely absurd. We should apply the same things to technology. The things that we've been seeing be true in our career to date have a very high probability of flipping on us in the course of the next few years. What is it that we think is true today relative to other things? What do we think is cheap versus dear? I look at people who are core engineers versus people providing service, and there was a belief people providing service would be lower paid and people who are engineers would be much higher paid. Is that going to continue to be true? What are the relative economics in your sector and how can you take advantage if they flip?
