That pretty well fits the typical mindset of the past decade. Nobody wants to take risks and build shit, everyone is instead looking for a noble excuse to get their share of money and authority without actually doing any hard work.
Take any amazing organization that does great things, give it a bunch of money, and have the revenue stream not get impacted by failure. You get rot. You get IBM 1960 vs IBM the 2010s - present horror show. You get Ford in 1920 vs Ford in 1980. And this isn't limited to the private sector. It's a feature of massive organizations where revenue is divorced from success.
The US Federal Government is an utter horror show. It was once an amazingly capable collection of efficient, nimble organizations. It could hire rogues and mavericks when needed, and was able to fire the desk-riders too. It's now a rotted-out shell. Success happens in-spite of, and never because-of, the organizations themselves.
I always invite people to go and work with one of the US Fed contractors or agencies. Go look at their job postings. Look at the energy levels of the team members. It's somewhere between a DMV and a mausoleum. Ask yourself if you honestly think they need more money or just far fewer, far higher paid staff with the same or even less budget. Then ask yourself if these organizations are capable of understanding, let alone governing, complex domains.
I doubt we'd be able to do that today at at least the same efficiency.
Except, there's also China with superior morale, superior education and superior efficiency, that might have better plans for the resources left behind a fallen empire...
China also has a huge population problem coming and it’s likely that they have already peaked economically (you’ll notice states like China get much more belligerent and bellicose as they fail ala Russia) and even that is due to government mismanagement.
So, my point is China isn’t some grand strategic master. They are a country with their own problems, likely even worse than most countries because problem exposition is strongly discouraged.
This doesn’t mean that America or any other country doesn’t have problems, but China isn’t particularly special here.
Uh, what?
Which it has largely done, and moves on. Saying it's not resilient enough to handle the situation seems to be wishful thinking in that case (and is obviously false in the case of Tiananmen Square or Tibet.)
I'll take shipbuilding, tank manufacture, aircraft construction, and logistics for World War Two, from a prior activity of about nil, as an example of accomplishment.
We tried tying money to success in our education system with No Child Left Behind and it was a disaster. When you have an organization that is struggling to make effective use of their budget, the solution is to replace the ineffective leadership, not decimate their budget and expect them to do better.
If you ever get bought by a Japanese conglomerate and your boss gets fired, rather than being relieved you should be worried, because you're next if things don't improve. I can't fault that logic, but it does seem to make at least some westerners a little complacent, cross-purposefully.
Not sure how this is related to your point about money, but I do think it's cultural. To work in the civil service right is not something our current culture rewards and/or admires. As such, you get a paucity of talent, hustle, and hard workers.
The people who decide your paychecks typically don't understand what you're doing anyways, so I wouldn't worry about that.
If you make a tool that has been in use for years - long enough that engineers who turned to management are now in senior management position remember using and liking it back int the day - then you can get a good paycheck to maintain it. Of course this assumes that the tool is still relevant 25 years from when you first created it. Note that this is about you creating and maintaining the tool, taking over someone else's tool might work, but is probably seen as a job for a junior developer.
In some cases you can wait for things to get really bad and then be rewarded for saving the day. (I strong oppose this - a good engineer should see problems and fix them before they get that bad)
You can spend 10% of your time maintaining tools so long as the other 90% has great value. Great value means you see the market need and develop the first prototype that demonstrates the idea works (then turn this over to a new team to make production worthy while you go on to invent something else).
You can run numbers to prove that your tool makes a difference. (Some at Facebook can show hundreds of thousands of dollars saved as a result of their tools)
There are probably others - but none are easy to get into.
It does. But not to me. There are entire teams with millions of dollars of budget to improve tooling.
But of course they only do what they like. And my management doesn't care enough to bring our complaints to them. Individual engineer complaints are ignored.
I raised this with the PMs repeatedly as a significant project risk. Oh... we can't do anything about that they chorused. That's a different department, that's a different budget, etc, etc... Excuse after excuse.
The PM salaries sum to about $1M per annum, but 3 laptops are just too hard for them to organise. Too hard. Can't be done. Just stop asking. Shh. We're busy.
I would say, be nice and polite, take your time learning whatever tech you need to get a better job, prepare for interviews, get an offer, shake hands and move on...
I once had to do development on a 640x480 resolution screen because those fancy large monitors are “too expensive”. That place had less than 30 staff.