This is well expressed; I've never heard anyone present this perspective before. This framework neatly explains why the experiences I've had working for big co

This is well expressed; I've never heard anyone present this perspective before. This framework neatly explains why the experiences I've had working for big companies have been consistently dismal, and why that's likely to be true at any big company regardless of their culture or the nature of their business: the kind of high-complexity, marginal-profit-seeking work described here is completely at odds with the values which motivate me, and with the goals I had when I went to work for those places. (I spent my entire stint at Microsoft working on one single "wicked feature", initially described as a simple, six-month starter project; it grew and grew, ultimately pulling in ten or fifteen people across half a dozen teams and putting them through a brutal sync-meeting schedule for literally years. The whole thing amounted to a single checkbox in some obscure settings dialog, meant to be clicked by a handful of institutional customers who wanted to save some disk space while porting their rickety piles of internal scripts from one ancient legacy platform to a newer legacy platform: for that, we made an unholy mess of permanent, irreducible complexity all over a couple of different codebases. I found it impossible to believe that the value of this feature could ever justify the cost of its creation, or its maintenance, and quit that job feeling that all I had accomplished there was to make things a little bit worse.)