The History of WageMachineWageMachine was born because of the rain. One sunny day I left my house in the Mission district of San Francisco to visit a friend near downtown. While I was there, it started raining. Heavily. Because I had my computer with me, I couldn't ride home. The obvious solution was to take the BART(the Subway for you non-San Francisco folks). However, I had been working at our startup without pay for the last 3 months. I had literally 6 cents in my bank account. I could not afford a BART ticket. Plenty of time, but no money to get home. It just so happened that earlier in the month I had read about a sculpture the artist Blake Fall-Conroy had created called the "Minimum Wage Machine". As a person cranks a handle on the machine, it slowly releases a penny every 5.04 seconds. That's about 12 pennies a minute, or $7.55 per hour. While I was watching the rain fall, I literally thought "I wish I had a minimum wage machine right about now"--I would have gladly cranked a handle for 20 minutes to earn the subway fare home. Then I thought, "why doesn't this exist?" Why do I have to choose between doing challenging programming work for $50-100 per hour or earning $0 per hour? Thus, I whipped out the laptop and got to work. Posted 01/04/2010 |