Meta Compensation Portrayed as Non-Compensation

>"Meta blew $30B+ into the Metaverse not because it had to, but because their pampered engineers would work for nothing short of $500k-$1m a piece, full well knowing this could never ship but their vacation home in Tahoe would be fine!"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/debarghya_das/status/1644728055024476160

What do you mean pampered? It's humiliation pay. "If I'm going to do something pointless, you have to pay for the inconvenience." "I could be doing something useful, like training, or building my CV, but I'm going to work on Meta instead. That will cost you."

A fortiori: if someone is going to order something pointless and expensive, you know they have lots of money that they don't need or want anymore, it's practically your duty to take as much of it as possible. You're doing them a favour by draining their wallet efficiently. Why pay lots of engineers a small amount, instead of a small number of engineers a large amount? The latter is merely more efficient, if the point is the spending. Same price, less hassle.

Finally, if you're going to do something pointless, you're obviously not going to get paid post-launch, given there will never be a real launch. You must be paid up-front. 

If anything the "engineers" "working" on Meta were underpaid. Didn't demand enough. I certainly hold them in contempt as well as Deedy here. "You worked on Meta? What, like...on purpose? Knowingly?" How much should they have charged for contempt pay? 

The market rate for this task was even higher than what was in fact paid.
>"If that was a normal startup, even assuming the same inefficiency of Facebook, they’d spend 3x less just by paying startup salary + equity."
Naw. For the actual product delivered (a reputation for patronage or something) it would have cost substantially more.

If you had to hire idiots dumb enough to work on Meta per se on the open market, you would have ended up with a programmer ghetto full of smelly idiots. Good odds they wouldn't even be able to code enough to meet corporate standards, let alone, like, actually code. Counterproductive for everyone involved. To pay for real programmers on the open market would cost even more than they in fact paid, esp. because they would have had to be paid enough to override Facebook execs before you had a spec they were willing to work on. Have to be higher social status than the existing management, so management can be overruled.