A very fuzzy pattern that has repeated itself in numerous industries: the easier money is to get/have, the less robust and exacting one has to be with the processes of attaining and maintaining it.
A clear example is with any of the numerous "high profile" VC-funded ventures. You can spend a lot of time and money over-engineering things, because you are not (and neither your boss or his boss and so on) involved in a feedback loop that is tightly coupled with the making of "real" money.
Your actions have no real consequences on the business unit as a whole, and no one is holding you to it. What tends to happen is it gets filled with "dreamers" and "schemers." Both who, rather than contributing to the health of the business, erode it for their own ends. Without there being a "tether to reality" so-to-speak, their actions no longer have to face reality a la profitability.
Generally, the consequences of this are many and I do not wish to enumerate on them (but I will drop these without going into any painstaking depth: organizations that are built primarily around key players' career interests, products made to that end, and even day-to-day choices that in the grand scheme of things mean nothing, but something as simple as choosing Redis as a primary relational database, all reverberate).
This is just my very sloppy attempt at putting intuition into words, but this is a pattern of varying magnitude that always emerges whenever money is detached from merit.
This happens in all sorts of personal and business contexts. Whenever the fruits of whatever labor are detached from its process, the less likely the processes used to attain and maintain it are "sound," sustainable, and so on.
Think of a lottery winner: he has just received a large sum of liquid cash, but he most likely neither has the ability to hold onto it or the know-how to grow it (much less make the same amount again). His decision-making and skillset is utterly detached from his gains. That sort of thing is only honed through a tight feedback loop.
The same can be seen with engineers who have only resided in corporate behemoths: drop them into a startup and they will likely flounder.
There is a much larger discussion to be had about human incentives, but I hope that you are able to make the intuitive jump yourself.
A clear example is with any of the numerous "high profile" VC-funded ventures. You can spend a lot of time and money over-engineering things, because you are not (and neither your boss or his boss and so on) involved in a feedback loop that is tightly coupled with the making of "real" money.
Your actions have no real consequences on the business unit as a whole, and no one is holding you to it. What tends to happen is it gets filled with "dreamers" and "schemers." Both who, rather than contributing to the health of the business, erode it for their own ends. Without there being a "tether to reality" so-to-speak, their actions no longer have to face reality a la profitability.
Generally, the consequences of this are many and I do not wish to enumerate on them (but I will drop these without going into any painstaking depth: organizations that are built primarily around key players' career interests, products made to that end, and even day-to-day choices that in the grand scheme of things mean nothing, but something as simple as choosing Redis as a primary relational database, all reverberate).
This is just my very sloppy attempt at putting intuition into words, but this is a pattern of varying magnitude that always emerges whenever money is detached from merit.
This happens in all sorts of personal and business contexts. Whenever the fruits of whatever labor are detached from its process, the less likely the processes used to attain and maintain it are "sound," sustainable, and so on.
Think of a lottery winner: he has just received a large sum of liquid cash, but he most likely neither has the ability to hold onto it or the know-how to grow it (much less make the same amount again). His decision-making and skillset is utterly detached from his gains. That sort of thing is only honed through a tight feedback loop.
The same can be seen with engineers who have only resided in corporate behemoths: drop them into a startup and they will likely flounder.
There is a much larger discussion to be had about human incentives, but I hope that you are able to make the intuitive jump yourself.