Bureaucracy

You Bought a Racehorse and Rented a Treadmill

September 28, 2026

The strangest math in enterprise hiring: paying sports-car money for output you then throttle by hand

A while back I sat in a coffee shop with someone from a very large, very admired technology company. Nine-figure revenue per quarter, the kind of place that puts "we hire only the top 1%" in its recruiting deck without irony.

He told me his last quarter honestly. Two weeks of real engineering. Ten weeks of alignment.

His compensation, fully loaded, was roughly the price of a mid-range sports car per year. So the company paid sports-car money and received, in terms of the thing they actually hired him for, a used scooter. Not because he was lazy. Because 80% of his calendar was owned by people whose job was to make sure nobody did anything surprising.

I hear a version of this story from nearly everyone I talk to who works inside the big names. It is consistent enough that it stopped being anecdote and started being physics.

The idiot index of a knowledge worker

There is a useful little instrument from manufacturing: take the cost of a finished part and divide it by the cost of its raw materials. A machined bracket that costs 200 euros but contains 8 euros of aluminum tells you something. Not that aluminum is expensive. That your process is stupid.