You're right that it's a matter of incentives, but it's because of cost not revenue.
It's bloated not because of a sneaky plan to include revenue generation. It's cheaper to make it bloated because quality is costly. They can externalize costs to users and nobody cares.
I remember playing The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall in the 1990s. It came on CD and was very buggy, and I would periodically call Bethesda and they would send me the newest patches on a floppy disk.
"Right" is a pretty dubious way of framing it when basically every company works this way. You don't really have any choice in the matter. Passing a law about this wouldn't be removing any rights of individuals any more than we "removed" their right to enter a contract for pay lower than minimum wage or with unsafe working conditions.
A more fair way of phrasing it would be to say that we should remove the right of companies to require it.
If you wanted you could also require companies to make this an option in the contract, which would it clear how much they are actually willing to pay for restricting peoples freedom outside of work in this way and gives employees the option of deciding if that tradeoff is worth it for them. I think that companies would not be willing to pay all that much for this if they couldn't just force it on everyone.
I beg to differ; Most people don't deserve to be abused, but those who dish out abuse on those who never asked for it, or on other such "innocents" absolutely deserve a full measure of abuse, since they clearly don't understand (or care) how it feels to be on the receiving end of it.
> It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.
This is true, but "treat their customers ok" goes a long way. When everybody else severely abuses their customers, the one company that doesn't generates a lot of goodwill.
People routinely overestimate how much can get done in 5 minutes. I ran a live coding challenge at our company's booth at a language conference. 5 simple problems, how many can you do in 5 minutes? We had a PC with IDE open and ready to go, function signatures pre-written with empty bodies, unit tests running to color an icon red/green next to your function. The first problem was return "hello world". They were things covered by the standard library like reverse a list, or filter, or map. Everybody thought it would be too easy.
Nobody could get more than 3 of them. Most people were shocked that 5 minutes was up already. My coworker who did interviews for our company was shaken that he had been judging applicants too harshly after he couldn't finish.
They were trivial problems. But 5 minutes is a very short amount of time.
You're right. I can see how I phrased that poorly. I meant what I said, but it also implies something that I don't.
It's not a requirement for a contract to be written by a lawyer, any more than a python script needs to be written by a professional coder. But in both cases the result tends to have problems. (skipping here how LLMs fit into this)
The way in which scripts and contracts can be "fixed" later are different, with no clever sound byte about just how these apples are different from oranges.
It's bloated not because of a sneaky plan to include revenue generation. It's cheaper to make it bloated because quality is costly. They can externalize costs to users and nobody cares.