Respectfully I have two qualms with your thoughts here, first is that lack of effort from one person must mean extra effort from another to balance out in some

Respectfully I have two qualms with your thoughts here, first is that lack of effort from one person must mean extra effort from another to balance out in some way, you could easily have people not pulling their weight but still be producing based on some leverage or multiplying factor in your business. More effort doesn't always equate to more value. Some businesses are just spinning their wheels, keeping themselves busy, while the core value generator keeps ticking over. I worked at a 10 man company that was turning over millions a month from automated lead generation, we could have all walked away for 6 months and it would have kept making money. The other is just that it's not a realistic way to look at a workforce, especially in software, hours and effort don't equate to an "output" neatly. Most software companies are in the business of making value producing automations, not producing the raw value themselves. You can have one production engineer in a factory completely eliminate someone's job with a nifty insight that took him an hour to spot, now that person isn't pulling their weight (because their job doesn't exist anymore) but the business is more profitable, for one example.