#3 is big as I'm not a security or IT person, but have had a big burden placed on me with regard to security. The biggest factor is work that was once done by internal employees in trusted areas is now outsourcers and contractors, sometimes from low pay higher corruption areas.
There's a constant fight of giving and removing access from an army of people. Additionally, there are often efforts to push these higher risk people into more confidential areas because the push to cut costs. Make one exception and then a "but this person has access" is sure to follow.
The "new contract" vs old sounds like internal problems where I work.
We'll have a contract signed and everything is OK for a couple years. Then someone goes ham on inventing an approval matrix and other policy/rules to keep the offshored workers from making mistakes, and we have problems. Vendors getting paid late because of policy.
Even if we provide the contract we'll get arguments that it can't be so because it says something different in their database. It's that way in their DB, because if unknown, they default to whatever is best for our company.
I think he was broken by "Games for Windows Live" on PC. They had to integrate it in Gears of War, and I think a lot of the industry saw it as Microsoft trying to steer the PC into being a MSFT only device. There was not much benefit for devs/pubs to using it, it was all good for Microsoft. He seems to want everything to be old school PC where anyone can sell in their own store and do what they want on a device.
However, it always feels weird to me on mobile since those devices were not really open and the maker always took their store cut. Epic knew this and got on those devices anyway, but then after Fortnite getting huge, wanted more of that mobile pie for themselves. That's sort of a generic take on mobile, as I haven't read through everything on this case.
I remember before this decision, I worked somewhere where people could take longer to be promoted as a temp, maybe even 2 years. I don't know that this was exploitive, it was usually a mix of developing competency and department having budget. If someone left the company, usually someone got immediately promoted out of being a temp. If not that, it was dependent on department budget increase in the next fiscal year.
The legal change meant some roles like QA were put on a company switching treadmill.
I never used GTD, but for ~15 years have used a mail plug-in for task management, deferrals, etc.
I have two main issues in recent years. There are now more requests that are 1 task in the requestors mind but are actually 5 to 10 tasks of various complexity. Then of those 5 to 10, only a portion are mine. It ends up being work to get the requestors into whatever ticket system they are supposed to use, and then keep myself separated from the stuff I have nothing to do with. A lot of people are just wired to want to have one person to deal with all their stuff.
The other is Direct Messaging. At one point slack seemed like a godsend as we could route all the Dist List spam and membership management into channels. DMs happened but were infrequent and generally from a handful of people on your team. This lasted for a few years until the corporate masses moved over to it. At that point it was "anyone could bother anyone else at any time" for something "urgent".
I don't know that they hire to inflate the share price.
In good times, I have felt like that some R&D projects exist just to say "we have people working on it" for investor calls and such. In bad times, those things can get cut.
I wonder if some of the lack of teenager tolerance has to do with larger congregations of teens due to social media. When I was young with no cell phone it was a non-trivial exercise to get a few friends to coordinate to meet and go to a movie.
Now you can start with 4 or 5 people, and if their friends and friends of friends start to get looped in then you have a larger group. Now instead of 0 or 1 obnoxious kids in a group, you may have 3-4 obnoxious ones and a much larger group.
Before cell phones, we didn't worry about making group plans. Everyone just went to the movies or the mall or the Taco Bell parking lot and everyone else went to.
Yes once upon a time 24-hour news meant 25 or 30 different news stories covered in a an our. Now it seems like 5 or less stories in a day, and most of it is panels and "experts" spouting vitriol.
There's a constant fight of giving and removing access from an army of people. Additionally, there are often efforts to push these higher risk people into more confidential areas because the push to cut costs. Make one exception and then a "but this person has access" is sure to follow.