That's because most companies don't consist solely of very senior people (they can't afford them). Among very senior and valuable people, contractors are a majority I think.
In general, in Poland most senior people work as (pretend) "contractors", because the taxes are drastically lower for them than for full-time employment (it's essentially a massive country-wide tax evasion scheme which is, at least for now, tolerated by the tax authorities). None of the labor protection laws (high overtime pay etc.) apply to them. I don't know if CDPR also hires a ton of "contractors", but I would be very surprised if they didn't - they'd be saying no to a ton of experienced people who just won't work as full time employees.
He also mentions setting realistic expectations. So, not "work hard to get rich" or "work hard to have a breakthrough scientific finding" (as there's too much involved there) but perhaps "work hard to be appreciated enough to make very good money" or "work hard so that I can make an non-trivial addition to my field of study" etc.
Also, if you're not really motivated by anything working hard can get you, then there's no point in hard work. Most people hate hard work and it's not worth it for them, hence they coast doing the minimum that doesn't get them fired. It's a perfectly valid life strategy, although the American religion of workoholism treats it as heresy (while millions of people practice it, feeling unnecessary guilt doing it).
> Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs - you can't become a wine contributor if it can be shown you ever read Windows source code and most likely conversely.
If that's the case, it should be easy to kill a project like wine - just send every core contributor an email containing some Windows code.
That's me. If I know that neighbor is doing something unreasonable, like leaving his garbage bags in the common hallway or listening music too loudly, I suspect he's just an antisocial asshole and the conversation will be rough at best.
Ah, so you're probably one of those overpaid non-managers that everyone hates... We have a bunch of those, they avoid work and responsibility like the plague, and in result the project is in severe leadership crisis.
The salaries of CEOs of European corporations are nowhere near as extravagant as in the US, but still they're closer to 25-50x salary of a senior dev (quick googling returned salaries for European CEOs in the $3-6m range)
The problem with that is that, outside of our personal lives, most of our meaningful activities and contributions in society are organized as jobs at companies (or various government bodies). In my country even more so than in the US, as there's almost no volunteering here. It's just hard to feel like you're living a meaningful life without a job, or running a company yourself.