Somebody who works at F1 told me F1 is a go-to example of a very expensive industry that is completely inefficient and heavily dependent on certain individuals.

Everybody at F1 is shocked by the amount of waste and inefficiency that is present in the industry. Its basically impossible to find any company that is happy with the state of the industry. The industry is very reliant on the leaders of the top performing teams and their top engineers. <br><br>Anybody who has been there more than 10 years has vast knowledge, a lot of people in the industry don't really know what they are doing. <br><br>Because of the vast knowledge possessed by the top people in the industry, they are essentially irreplaceable, you can't find another person who has as much knowledge. Of course, they are paid a lot for their work. <br><br><br>So now you will go "so how does it work if F1 is so heavily dependent on F1 top people?". Well, its basically like a super powerful top down system where they design something, and then people who are "below" them basically don't have any say in how to design it, they are told how to do it and they do it.<br><br>So, they are essentially very smart people who are very good at giving orders, but they don't really design anything anymore, most of the work is done by people who are just following orders in other offices.<br><br>Everybody knows that basically all the work is done by people in other offices, so it means that top people in the top teams just have to look at other teams' designs and then make a more efficient design, but in reality they are just copying other team's designs because top people in teams can't really design anything anymore.<br><br>Everybody knows that other teams copy their designs, but basically top people in top teams are stealing other team's designs and then adjusting it a bit to make it "better", but in reality, they are basically just "stealing" somebody else's designs, and if top teams copy their designs, they are not losing anything, they will just steal other team's designs again, and other teams will steal their designs again. <br><br><br>So, F1 is basically an industry that is completely based on top people in top teams stealing other peoples ideas and then stealing other peoples ideas again, and it is heavily dependent on them because basically "lower" people don't really know what they are doing. <br><br>Anybody who has been there more than 5 years has vast knowledge that is very valuable. Usually, they will start their own companies. There is F1 company where basically all of their employees have 10+ years of experience with other team. They had three different CEOs in the span of 5 years, because most employees have 10+ experience so they are like "why would i listen to you, CEO, i know more than you, i was there for 15 years". They basically tell "CEOs" what to do. All CEOs of that company were F1 engineers, but that is not enough, because they basically don't know anything about the industry. Top engineers basically tell them how to manage the company and what decisions to make.