>I've seen many friends at big/elite tech firms get paid to do very little.
What matters is the outcome, not the amount of effort one puts in. If you're working at e.g. Google for $200,000 a year, your changes can affect millions to billions of people. At that scale even a small improvement like making Google Sheets load 1% faster can equate to millions of dollars of additional revenue downstream -- and likely tens of millions of dollars of actual value, since the largest tech companies actually capture only a low percentage of the value they create for their consumers.
You've just justified that $200k several times over for what might amount to two or three day's worth of effort for you, that's true. That's not a bug - that's a feature of working in a successful, scalable business. If you're inclined to do more than this "bare minimum" which you observe so many doing, just imagine how much value you could create for others if you actually worked close to your capacity in such a place.
>[B]ecause of the exponential advancement of technology, huge accrual of capital and inability of human incentive structures to keep up, value does not universally equal money.
I don't understand the thread of logic here. Claiming that human incentive structures are "unable to keep up" with value creation suggests to me that money is, if anything, a heavily lagging indicator of the real value one is generating, which is in line with the point above. But I don't think that is the point you are trying to make.
>Meta's VR division has burned through $50 billion, but it's people got paid incredible salaries.
Most company actions are bets that the company's leadership think are net positive. Sometimes those bets don't pan out the way we expect them to - that's normal. Your own research might take longer than you expect it to, but that in itself isn't a reason to look back and say you made a bad bet.
As for the people, yes, you generally have to pay a lot to get top talent, and even that doesn't assure you of success. That's probably 2-4 years, out of a 30- or 40-year career, where their contributions may have been net negative to the bottom line. Maybe. If we include caveats like "Meta VR never becomes profitable in the future, either" and "none of the innovations from Meta VR turn out to be profit-generating via a different, unexpected mechanism". This probably equalizes out over the course of a career for the vast majority of these engineers. Not exactly a ship sinker.
>One in three Nvidia employees are now worth over 20 million. Many of them were working decent jobs making GPUs for video games and suddenly because of AI, their net worth went up 100x.
AI is hugely, hugely useful for all kinds of people. I use it every day both professionally and personally. Almost everyone I know does the same. If you truly derive no value at all from it, you are decidedly in the minority.
Is the claim here that they shouldn't have made money off of helping to manufacture the hardware that enables this invention which so many have found so enormously useful? Or maybe it's that since they never intended for their hardware to be useful for such a thing, their involvement should be worth less. That sounds way more like trying to invent a human incentive structure that can't keep up with the exponential advancement of technology than what we actually have. The current incentive structure, however, is wonderfully open to serendipity like this.
>The other part of the equation, wealth as a signal, has become incredibly noisy.
You've just given two examples where one company's wealth fell up to $50b because they made a bet on something that (for now) nobody wants, and another company's wealth went so high that a plurality of their employees are now millionaires because they made something everyone wants. That doesn't sound like a low signal-to-noise ratio to me.