[whatshisface]

An alternate story:

In a big company belief that something is worthwhile is better than actual value because market forces, that care about actual value, cannot act on each sub-project out of thousands of projects in the same company independently; but managers, which by definition can only care about their beliefs (idealism rears its ugly head again) do very much act on teams independently. The engineering department will pay $500k+ to engineers who exist only to pervert insufficiently representative metrics just as readily as the market would stop that from happening if they weren't hiding in an autocratic structure hundreds of times larger than the limits of their own abilities to be wasteful.

Indeed, there is no reason to think that the market has a greater ability to eliminate waste within a company worth $100B than it has within a communist country (which exists as an entity in international markets) worth the same.

[AdrianB1]

There is a lot of waste in companies and there is a lot of waste in communist regimes, but they have very different root cause. Markets cannot eliminate waste fast enough, big companies take forever to react - adjust or die - and countries similarly. Also in most cases waste is not eliminated as first measure, but start with stupid cost reduction in valuable areas, while the real waste will be the last to go. Why? Because most of that waste is on purpose for political reasons in both cases - the communist party member or the nephew of the VP that occupy positions that are not needed or they don't qualify for, that is on purpose.

Also $500k engineers should have as the only purpose in life to do engineering, working on projects that are found by management to be important, not to find themselves something to do. Most engineers are bad at business decisions and it would be a waste of time and skills for them to do it anyway. An engineer with business knowledge is no longer an engineer, is a product owner or a senior architect, etc.