Engineers are a specific kind of people. Their brains wired slightly differently. Freud would have called it compulsion neuroses. Suppressed compulsion neuroses. A regression to sado-analistic libidinal stage. A want to control and dominate everything. Since they cannot control everything, they settle for a field. They need it so bad so that this neurosis doesn't spill into other parts of their lives that they would do it for free, its a bonus that it pays good bucks. Somewhere in their psychological development, they've associated order (in whatever limited axiomatic space) and control as their totems for mental sanctity. They stand dwarfed before the exalted machine and can immediately slip into a cog and start fixing it. They do not ask, nor care, what this machine does or whether anybody needs it. They just bow at the altar of the machine
A machine is workable, understandable, fixable, unlike the chaos of their reality outside of this machine. Complexity can be unraveled in a machine. Knots just a another field in topology. Although they look similar, mathematicians are different breed. Mathematicians write the scriptures, engineers put them into production. Mathematicians truth seeking as they are, contruct ever-simplified systems propped by axioms that do a lot of heavy-lifting. Truth with conditions applied. Its ironic that as reality-evaders as they are, Engineers deal in the empirical. Take the truth out of its axiomatic context, batter, weld, glaze it with fire till it can move the machine 0.05% more efficiently. And if you scoff at this, when this is done at scale, something mathematicians cannot even fathom, each of these 0.05%s add up. Again, stop asking about the machine's purpose. Nobody cares, only that is efficient. They desire nothing but the niggling din in their heads that only quiets when they are building something.
Like any other compulsive neurotic, they are also obsessed with external validation. If a tree is fallen with 0.05% increased efficiency in the forest, does it make a noise? It's nice to see the improvement and that's their primary M.O.. But like the regressed social beings they are, they need a Daddy to pat their backs, and their heads, and if luck would have it their pee-pees. This relationship to Daddy never really fully matured so it's still stuck in this love-hate dichotomy. A rejection of authority but a love for swag, to wear Father's name on their backs. Corporate Daddy. Fancy Startup Daddy. Conference Daddy. Reviewer #2 Daddy. Engineering Manager Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy whose throats they want to grip and snap with their fingers but whose approval they are dying to drink like a late-season mango's juice dripping over their elbows.
100B, 200B, 300B - the bigger the Daddy, the better. Everything is quantitative afterall. Money is just numbers now. It may mean use-value, exchange-value to a different being. But once there's a number on it, its in engineering territory, it's another quantitative term to be optimized. This is not the thirst of a gambler, a compulsive engineer is never gambling. They have dug burrows into the grooves of their brains to optimize the number. The pleasure is in the process of scraping their minds with their bare fingernails, not just seeing the number go up.
The problem is Daddy knows this about you. He drools at your unwavering need to fix things. He knows you are dying to lick that drool off his face flat-tongued. And he is more than happy to oblige.