> That's what they're directly or indirectly being graded on.

We need firewalls. One group's primary concern needs to be on the product. Another group's primary concern needs to be on keeping the business alive and profitable.

Too much of the former and you fail to prioritize the right work. Too much of the latter and you build vaporware. The downsides of biasing in one direction is certainly worse than the other...

  > my wife hates that I see this in everything, but - hidden inflation is a thing.

I have a fundamental belief that there's far more complexity than we let on. That as we advance complexity only increases. What was once rounding errors end up becoming major roadblocks. It's the double edged nature of success: the more you improve the harder it is to improve. I truly will never understand how everyone (including niche experts) thinks things are so simple.

But my partner is doing her PhD in economics, so she also thinks about opportunity costs quite a lot but I think she (and a lot of her friends) were quite unaware of how a lot of stuff operates in tech[0].

Probably doesn't help that, as you know, I'm not great at brevity :/

[0] My favorite thing to at her department get togethers (alcohol is always involved) is to introduce them to open source software. Quite a number of them find it difficult to understand how much of the world is based on this type of work and how little money it makes. Not to mention the motivations behind it. The xz hack led to some interesting discussions...

Perhaps it's because I've been in tech for so long, but I can't comprehend PhD candidates not knowing about open source software.