[mjewkes]

>an awful lot of modern professional life consists of producing artifacts whose primary audience is other people producing artifacts. Slide decks for slide decks, strategy documents about strategy documents

This is because thinking, communication, and collaboration are extremely valuable.

[robot-wrangler]

Yeah, but there's a point here. Are you comfortable with financial derivatives? Derivatives of derivatives? Futures of futures at the 4th, 5th or 50th order? The point being that if you go too far from the substance of things then you've lost the plot.

Engineers, especially SWEs, have lots of aphorisms to discourage exactly this and try to put it into professional doctrine and culture. (YAGNI, KISS, secondary-systems syndrome, etc)

Most people in management, finance, politics etc won't ever see it as bad unless they actually receive bad feedback. But bad feedback never comes if the incentive structures are broken (that's the point of TFA)