I'd recommend reading bullshit jobs by David graeber. Most jobs in most organisations have an incentive structure for an individual to keep themselves employed rather than to actually solve problems.
I think Graeber misses the mark quite substantially, in that I think to the extent that BS jobs exist, they are rarely perceived as such by the people who are doing them (in fact, the data suggests the opposite correlation: people doing important but 'shit' jobs are more likely to report that their work is bullshit than people doing work that Graeber would view as 'bullshit', like management consulting and marketing).
Possibly, I mean in the book there's a hard number survey that says 37% of their sample described their job as not making a meaningful difference. It's a great book.
I'm with you that the world in general is filled with bullshit jobs, but I do not subscribe to the perspective of wholesale bullshit jobs in the cited "big tech," since in general I do not think that jobs which have meaningful ways to measure them easily fall into bullshit. Maybe middle managers?
Do you reckon the KPI's and performance indicators used in big tech count as meaningful ways to measure performance? Wouldn't someone implementing a complex resume-driven project score highly on these measurements, despite a simpler solution being correct? I am not sure that job-hopping every 18 months to maximise TC (ie optimise against your incentives) is a great way to learn about long-term design and organisational implications.
I'm not saying that these jobs are bullshit in the same way that a VP of box-ticking is, just that it's not a conspiracy that a cathedral based on 'design-doc culture' might produce incentives that result in people who focus on maximising their performance on these fiscally rewarding dot points, rather than actualising their innate belief in performant and maintainable systems.
I work at a start-up so if my code doesn't run we don't get paid. This motivates me to write it well.
