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Or the typical poor execution at extremely large tech companies. Where various people have incentives that aren't aligned with the overall objective of making a good product. Instead people are incentivized to empire build and be self serving.


As a small company veteran -it absolutely happens at that level as well.


Company politics makes me amusingly think that tech building would be so much more efficient if we had basic income. Then perhaps people would be deincentivized to show up for work where they didn't care about the output. And everyone who did show up are there to get something very specific done.

You get less people but you might get people who are there for the right reasons. Kind of like OSS.


I have a more cynical take on it. I see 2 likely outcomes:

1) You would end up with people showing up for whom it was important to those people regardless of their ability to perform the job. This is sort of like what happens with community theater. Someone who “loves the stage” but sucks at actual acting shows up at every audition and rehearsal. They never improve at acting but they always show up.

2) Things would break down into different factions with barely discernible differences of opinion making incompatible systems. You get smart capable people who can’t get along with others making essentially the same thing in multiple incompatible ways.


After all, isn't this how every action within any corporation is set into motion? →

"We want to make more money." → "How can we make more money?" → "These are the ways we can make more money." → "Which of these ways is the cheapest to execute now / maintain later?" → "Make this."

It's only coincidental if an action aligns with the interests of anyone outside the corporation.

In fact, this is how it works within any group in human civilization, sometimes substituting "money" with "power".




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