>> tech companies in general should be doing significantly more to protect their engineers' time, and the ones that get good at this are going to have outsized

>> tech companies in general should be doing significantly more to protect their engineers' time, and the ones that get good at this are going to have outsized impact I have just watched history of The Secret of Monkey Island (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F9ahZQ7oP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F9ahZQ7oP0). What struck me was how relatively cheap it was (if I remember correctly it costed 130000$ and main team was only 3 people). I now that it was a different time, but even if You take the inflation (of money and requirements) into consideration its still a miracle. And one of the reasons given for this project success was that Schafer and the rest was left alone to do their thing - I would not say they were protected, but at least nobody important enough paid attention to them to start messing with their creative process. This is somehow consistent with my general observation - that in knowledge based work only small subset of people do the real work.