I've been working for a well-known tech company for the last 9 months as an intern and one thing stands out to me as a sad and stress-inducing revelation: most people don't contribute to the financial value of the company. I'd say about 20% of the people, most of whom are hardcore smart engineers deliver 90%+ of the value. Notice that value != Work so I'm not claiming that they do most of the work, simply that they do most of the complex, difficult and important work that actually determines our position in the market.
From Wikipedia:
Law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly or typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.[1] Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
Which by extension means most of us working in tech companies are probably useless in the grand scheme of things :)
