> You can ask the same for the median 330k salary in the US for Uber Engineering

People DO.

It's well known that most tech companies are ran incompetently. As you say, it's not the engineers' fault.

But most projects and hiring in these companies exists to juice promotion criteria. And that, depending on perspective, these companies are either massively overstaffed or massively underproductive.

The comparison to AI spending being wasteful holds up pretty well, these are companies that readily piss away billions in pointless spending.

The massive misalignment in large companies is no secret. But neither is the fact that when someone comes to cut, they also have no idea of who is doing load bearing work that matters, and who doesn't. I look at recent cuts around my large corp, and it's clear they are made at levels that have no visibility of the ground, and are uninterested in said visibility. Obvious mistakes that are worse than what claude would have told you (yes, I asked Claude to pretend to make the budget cuts in our org y looking at the same data an exec could probably get. They were better than what happened)

I think it's a general problem, but in my rare conversations with execs nowadays, they seem rather uninterested in improving their decision making there. The actual performance of the organization does not appear to be all that relevant to them.