This tracks, reminds me of Cory Doctorow's talk on reverse centaur situation where he gave a nice rundown of the tech market of the past 15+ years.

Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.

Wasn’t familiar with this, tracked it down

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-revers...

> There’s a bit of automation theory jargon that I ab­solutely adore: “centaurs” and “reverse-centaurs.” A centaur is a human being who is assisted by a machine that does some onerous task (like transcribing 40 hours of podcasts). A reverse-centaur is a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace.