If you have a highly profitable company you can go a really long way. Stability breeds instability... and any sufficiently complex system is operating at the limit of some instability.
To take Google as an example (cuz I think it's actually not a bad company and certainly quite profitable, where I used to know a lot of people in different areas) over 80% of income is ads and 60% of the total is search ads. There's YouTube(ads), Gmail(ads), Android (ads and Play Fees), and Cloud (fees that might cover costs?). But I'd bet that 80% of the people are working on 20% of the profits. Certainly, I'm familiar with the hardware side and that is flat out a loss leader. Don't even get started with the Bets. The last 20-30% (of engineers!) probably produce absolutely nothing that any customer will every see, or are producing net losses of the company over the lifetime of the product.
It's hard to get real motivated about even a product you make when the company considers it a loss maker... that makes it the plaything of executives. Because, whatever the folks at Meta may be capable of or want to do with VR, there's really just one customer who's last name starts with Z. It's just politics at that point and pleasing the managers since the easiest way to higher profits is to kill the whole division.
Of course VCs face some of the same issues, but at least there you have a target customer (maybe the wrong) and a product (maybe the wrong one), and you know your work isn't BS when you're profitable post IPO.
To take Google as an example (cuz I think it's actually not a bad company and certainly quite profitable, where I used to know a lot of people in different areas) over 80% of income is ads and 60% of the total is search ads. There's YouTube(ads), Gmail(ads), Android (ads and Play Fees), and Cloud (fees that might cover costs?). But I'd bet that 80% of the people are working on 20% of the profits. Certainly, I'm familiar with the hardware side and that is flat out a loss leader. Don't even get started with the Bets. The last 20-30% (of engineers!) probably produce absolutely nothing that any customer will every see, or are producing net losses of the company over the lifetime of the product.
It's hard to get real motivated about even a product you make when the company considers it a loss maker... that makes it the plaything of executives. Because, whatever the folks at Meta may be capable of or want to do with VR, there's really just one customer who's last name starts with Z. It's just politics at that point and pleasing the managers since the easiest way to higher profits is to kill the whole division.
Of course VCs face some of the same issues, but at least there you have a target customer (maybe the wrong) and a product (maybe the wrong one), and you know your work isn't BS when you're profitable post IPO.