> How do you think companies decide on budgets? With great effort and generally mediocre results. Figuring out the contribution of an individual project is har

> How do you think companies decide on budgets? With great effort and generally mediocre results. Figuring out the contribution of an individual project is hard. An individual person even more so. And this isn't because we're not smart enough, it's because the idea of an individual contribution when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is not coherent. So how do you split the returns? Well, the entire field of cooperative game theory has something to say about that, and the answer is complicated but the gist is that it depends less on contribution and more on negotiating power. Are you willing and able to just leave if you don't get what you want? Are you hard to replace? Can you do your stuff with a different company if you leave? All that is much more important than how much your presence benefits the common enterprise compared to the counterfactual where nobody did your job.