It’s a reference to this quote:
“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (source)
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
It’s a combination of “temporarily embarrassed future billionaire” with the (mostly mythical) “garage software business founder”.
Many software programmers (including me) spent the first decade of our careers sure we would produce a world-shaking program in our garage, and then found a company to scale it to the world.