alt Hacker NewsIt's largely also down to management hierachy. Valve and Jane street for example both have semi-anarchist managment structures. In normal companies like GitLab, your worth as a manager and compensation is usually tied directly to the hierarchiecal structure. This incentivises you to create a project to hire a team and so on.
Yup, it's certainly a mix. I think the stock market incentive is most obvious for the usual VC-style "this must look presentable to the stock market before IPO"-spiel. After that I'd expect management/corp politics incentives to play a larger part indeed.
But isn't tech a bit unique in how accepted this kind of self-serving corruption is at pretty much all levels? From the "This might require a few extra folks, but I want to pad my resume" IC level all the way up to "Let's make this look good for Wall Street" exec level.