Comment by etruong42

This is also my experience at Google, and I have not really figured out the incentives. Plenty of people seem _perfectly comfortable_ with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars when nothing that they do matters. And it takes enormous effort to get anything actually done in the face of our enormous bureaucracies. I have a few hypotheses:

  - Career progression is still a motivation. If there are enough sufficiently motivated people in the organization (whether they come from upper management, middle management, or frontline workers), leaders need to harness that motivation and move it in a direction and potentially dole out career rewards. Otherwise, that motivation that is not properly harnessed can be destructive.
  - Similar to the previous hypothesis, they might axed _because_ nothing they do matters. So they may thrash about, making enough noise and movement to convince enough people that they might actually be doing something important, and it would be risky to dismiss them from their position.
  - Turf wars/politics/etc. If you do "nothing", then you look replaceable. If you're just a very expensive paper-weight, someone may try to usurp your highly-paid paperweight position. Thus, the nash equilibrium is to do something that makes your position less likely to be usurped by making it look difficult or that you are uniquely qualified to do it.