> fair enough, fyi my line of thought is a bit Marxist, you should get paid based on your labour, time, mental energy etc put in the work as much as the result. When you pay people according to only "impacts" you create an incentive to make "viral" things. In software these days even without such incentive taking full effect, over abstraction, one-size-fits-all, github star counting are becoming bigger problems.

Hmnn but doing it that way feels like it would devalue doing things smarter which seems to be more beneficial to society. Single-mindedly incentivizing labor seems like it would skewer efficiency -- I guess like most things the right answer is in the middle.

I'm not sure what you mean by "viral" things but I'm trying to discuss only about work output. If the work output is virality (let's say a social media manager), then it makes sense to measure that way, but usually businesses don't deal in that currency -- they deal in product shipped out or contracts landed, etc. That said, I'm well aware that systems that think themselves to be closest to the capitalist ideal are pretty brutal on the cogs in the machine.

As a side note, it's a red flag for me when I see github projects that are too concerned with stars/going viral, or even when I see presentations about projects that mention stars. Everyone thinks it's silly but everyone keeps doing it -- if only we'd stop then people would start judging projects on things other than adoption. Then again, adoption is the biggest metric for most people, because it generally is a proxy for "availability of free support/feature development", and in that sense I'm guilty of the same.

> The fact that you completely ignore the hardware is very telling. CPU has been improved according to Moore's law in the past few decades, if anything modern software engineering failed to live up to that potential and has been free riding on top of progress in hardware.

> It's insane to make robots move but software is a small part of that, there is also mechanical/electrical engineering, battery techs etc. Software sitting at the top of that stack shouldn't takes all the credit. It's very hard to innovate on the lower layers with all the lab work and physical constrains.

Agreed! There is more than enough value to go around to be shared between all those kinds of engineering -- just because I didn't mention lithography engineers or materials science engineers or people who smelt silicon doesn't mean they don't exist and don't deserve to be paid.