What a brilliantly terse formulation of the topic complex that had me pondering for quite a while now! In some manner, "mulling over casually on-and-off" for 2

What a brilliantly terse formulation of the topic complex that had me pondering for quite a while now! In some manner, "mulling over casually on-and-off" for 2 decades. > Under the right organizational structure and incentives, people are exceedingly bright at optimizing for their personal success. Optimizing organisations for converging towards such structure-and-incentives would be the money-shot, wouldn't it.. the only set-up coming to my mind proven to work (for team sizes greater than 1) are the cliche garage up-start and "small gang of well-aligned-in-skill-levels-and-obsession, ~90% of the work/design 100% under own control, product-builders". In other words, how can every small tech team feel like "early-days id Software" --- or rather, the perception of it that prevailed. > The principal-agent problem is a crippling handicap that hobbles every medium/large business today. The day we find better ways to solve this problem, is going to be a transformational day in the history of our civilization Indeed. "Medium/large" is worth repeating. Small shops need to get to medium to be able to financially and mentally afford to become some-degree-of-"wasteful". The question then becomes, why is this dynamic so predictably playing out every time that they indeed will? Is it human nature? A case of "everyone who continually succeeds in meeting their next goal eventually rises to their level of incompetence"? Is it that as soon as the adrenaline-rush of ensuring "the bacon" has actually worked, we naturally relax and become playful? With the only way to express 'playful' in a "serious setting" being to endlessly bikeshed and adopt new toys to play with, I mean "promising/proven tech to adopt and migrate/pivot to"? Remember early-Google's (maybe they still have it) "20% of the week is play-time (at least for developers)". No (or at least reduced) need to channel the urge into counterproductive role-plays of long-winded 'architectural/tech/stack/paradigm debates'. No matter how you cut it, they must have gained heaps from this arrangement not just in product prototypes like Gmail, Maps etc but probably also simply in reduced time-wasting back then. I do suspect for 99+%-software companies, the most fruitful model might turn out to be like this but with 80% devoted to the "play approach" and only 20% of the week to revisiting the concern's concerns that inform and subtly (re)direct in what problem areas to "play more". It's just a bit too radical-seeming to invest a-million-plus in, unless it's one's own millions (and possibly reserved for structures that don't primarily aim every second of every day to "exit" from their own construction).. I suspect the remaining 20% "serious" puts that aspect in the right adrenaline-driven ultra-effective no-BS 'hungry hunting mode'/context and would remain crucial so that "play" doesn't drift off into 'massaging sandcastley no-one ever asked for'..