> Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system ... tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out profit for themse

> Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system ... tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out profit for themselves. So do workers, to be fair. The goal of workers in purchasing departments and HR isn't to make the business more efficient but to propagate a cushy lifestyle for themselves and their mates. To an extent, that same misalignment exists in all classes of worker, including engineers. SWEs are probably the worst at this; so many of the problems that we solve don't have anything to do with squeezing the most performance out of the hardware or reducing technical debt. Instead, a huge chunk of our time is spent on man-made bullshit that sysadmins don't solve properly because otherwise they'd be out of a job.