I wonder how much of this is related to the how the executive class at most FAANG companies has give up on the goal of "tech athleticism" in favor of legibility

I wonder how much of this is related to the how the executive class at most FAANG companies has give up on the goal of "tech athleticism" in favor of legibility to management. Every non-tech company I've been at has been able to move faster than the FAANG companies I've seen from the inside. The coordination overhead is so much lower it is unreal. You aren't forced into inefficient one-size-fits-all microservice-based architectures with O(nlog(n)) infrastructure overhead. You can use programming languages that make experienced developers productive, rather than minimizing what a new grad has to learn before they can be bullied into working longer hours. Trying to coordinate complex features in a low-trust, high-overhead environment these companies have gone to a style of up-front planning that makes Mythical Man Month's waterfall look nimble and enlightened. With overhead so high, you can't experiment or build incrementally: as soon as one feature is delivered, you are expected to move on to whatever objective a VP has identified as the next important thing. That is if you even have time to code anymore, what with the hours of meetings each week to discuss the prose we are going to write to get permission to draw a picture that will have to go through approval before coding can begin. Non-tech companies, the executives don't know enough about tech to want to micromanage like that. At most you'll hear from them what they want the technology to accomplish. If you can make it do that? You have a golden ticket. You also often get to talk to your actual customers, and have the mandate to fix the things that bother them about the software. Instead of having to deliver a feature so a salesperson can check off a check box during their bakeoffs and buy a slightly bigger yacht next year, you can focus on how valuable and reliable and maintainable software is. _And the company makes more money when you do_, so they are happy. And if you bother to calculate your hourly wage instead of just looking at your annual, well, I've found it shocking how underpaid many FAANG engineers are now that they aren't being paid in shares cruising up a bubble. When this article says "work-life balance", what it actually means is "not being expected to donate your time to your company on pain of firing." You have a tech company boasting about the "dozens" of major features it launches each year, and then you realize that per engineer that's like one feature per 2,000 developers. Athletic they are not.