The fact that they have a the market position and capital to buy up human resources and waste them simply to keep competitors from being able to develop products goes to show that they are abusing their monopoly positions. Wouldn't it be better for the economy & society at large if these talented people were working hard at building new & better products?

Alas, the employee would have to act ultimately.

People respond to incentives. If you can get paid 250K+ to sit around and hang out on reddit all day, why wouldn't you do that instead of busting your ass?

Because some people want to work, to be useful? Redditing is like shouting into the void, totally useless (hacker news is kinda similar). At the top of Maslow's hierarchy is where you find the need to do work that contributes to society.

I read this NYTimes articles about a New Yorker who was paid $5m to vacate his apartment for new development. He was the last hold out. It turns out when he was young he was in medical school but dropped out after he received a sizable inheritance. He was also quite good in school etc...

His regret? I could've been a doctor! Basically he felt his life was unlived and unexamined despite the luxury of money.

So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?

But most contributions to society are about labour saving - if we don't think that kind of life is valuable then surely those contributions aren't really valuable either.

> So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?

Forever. There are 7 billion people in this world. If it's not you or me, there will always be someone else.

If I spend more than a week without getting meaningful work done, I get extremely depressed. I love the thrill of building projects and creating business value.

You'd actually have to pay me more to do nothing than to do something.

This was Microsoft's strategy post-dotcom implosion. "We have more money than everyone. Hire all the smart people even if we don't have anything for them to do." It worked until...Google.

True. The issue then becomes: what could they be doing for society? This takes more ingenuity and leadership.

Yeah...then again a lot of brilliant software engineers get to a point in their career where they realize how hard they've been working. Then they start to focus on other parts of their life with ample time and money they never had before. It's not a terrible thing by any means.

Some people willfully choose to turn their focus towards their personal lives, raising their kids, etc while still being paid a lot of money in a cushy job where they are respected.

Noam Chomsky visited Google and basically asked this question.