> every day I wonder how come I do so few now that I'm paid compared to when I was jobless and hacking prototypes for $0

Salary is inversely proportional to how much you actually (need to) do.

Lobby your government to tax management hours. That’ll fix things.

I often wonder how some open source projects manage to be so successful/productive with so little of what looks like corporate management.

How would you implement this though? Wouldn't things just be renamed?

A difficult quest indeed, but not impossible. Sometimes teams like this do exist.

You know the ones. They founded the trillion-dollar companies you hear about and became billionaires themselves

Nah, it's usually luck and robbing someone else work, windows apple Facebook etc

I'm going to say it is efficiency and the ability to implement ideas well, even if they are stolen ideas, that account for more of the success for anything else.

I also bet they did come up with some small things here and there themselves, in the process of implementing stolen ideas, because often things become apparent at the moment of implementation.

yeah there's always something a bit special in success, even if they took the idea, you can't just copy paste or you just produce shallow shiny stuff