Story Details
Explainers, trends, and perspectives on the space this product works in.
The changing shape of work makes contribution harder to see
The Changing Workforce
Remote work did not go back in the box
A few years ago working from home was the exception. It settled into a standing part of knowledge work. By a global survey of working arrangements, college-educated employees now do about a quarter of their paid days from home, well below the 2020 peak but far above where it started. The practical result is teams whose members may never share a room, which is where the trouble with judging contribution begins. Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12260529/
There have never been more developers
The pool of people building software keeps growing. By one widely cited estimate there were more than 45 million active software developers worldwide in 2025, and the tools keep lowering the bar to contributing code. More builders means more projects, more collaborators per project, and more work that has to be tracked and credited. Source: https://www.slashdata.co/post/global-developer-population-trends-2025-how-many-developers-are-there
The creator economy is a workforce
Making things online has grown from a hobby into work for a very large number of people. Estimates vary widely with the definition, from tens of millions who earn from content to a few hundred million who identify as creators, per a 2022 Adobe study. Most are not celebrities. They are individuals and small teams earning from what they produce, often across several platforms at once, each of which owes them something. Source: https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2022/adobe-future-of-creativity-study-165m-creators-joined-creator-economy-since-2020
- Earning from content is now common work
- Individuals and small teams, not only celebrities
- Income spread across several platforms
More people work more than one job
Holding more than one job, or working across several projects at once, is increasingly common, and it has a name now: polywork. In the United States about one in twenty employed people holds more than one job, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When a person's working time is split across employers and clients, their pay has to follow work that is spread across places rather than tied to one desk. Source: https://www.self.inc/info/americans-with-two-or-more-jobs/
Why the shape makes contribution hard to see
More than a century ago the engineer Maximilien Ringelmann measured people pulling on a rope and found that each pulled less as the group grew. The Ringelmann effect, later studied as social loafing, is a reminder that judging individual contribution inside a group is genuinely hard, and it gets harder as the group scatters across places, projects, and platforms. The shift in how work is arranged is exactly what makes a clear record of who did what, and a fair way to split the value, worth building. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect
More stories
The Linux kernel measures authority in patches merged
LWN's development statistics for a recent Linux kernel release record thousands of commits from more than two thousand developers spread across hundreds of employers, and standing on the project follows the code each one has merged. That running log answers questions of credit and authority from evidence, the kind of record most smaller teams never keep.
Bug bounties pay by measured impact, one contribution at a time
HackerOne reports paying out tens of millions of dollars across its programs over a twelve-month window, pricing each submission by the impact it carries rather than the time it took. That model shows a market can value individual contributions when impact is observable, and it also marks where the valuation gets hard once work stops arriving as discrete findings.