> It feels like perpetual money laundering of shareholder value into contractors (and employees, honestly, too).
I've come to view the economics of tech this way too (although much more so true of contractors than employees). Workers are supposedly the downtrodden sucker class beneath BigWigs. But, if positioned the right way, workers can make out like absolute bandits, often at the expense of executives and majority shareholders. I've worked many useless, bloated projects that lined consultants' pockets before ending in layoff-inducing/executive-firing failure, projects that - ironically - were initiated at the behest of said executives themselves.
In a general sense, I don't really understand where the value is being generated in tech anymore. One of the higher-level things that has slowly gotten me disillusioned with the industry. Just a constant parade of companies either 1. never turning a profit or 2. milking one cash cow built in the 90s, both types of companies just churning stupid projects over and over so that engineers can write new things on their resumes and executives can go from Director to VP.
I've come to view the economics of tech this way too (although much more so true of contractors than employees). Workers are supposedly the downtrodden sucker class beneath BigWigs. But, if positioned the right way, workers can make out like absolute bandits, often at the expense of executives and majority shareholders. I've worked many useless, bloated projects that lined consultants' pockets before ending in layoff-inducing/executive-firing failure, projects that - ironically - were initiated at the behest of said executives themselves.