Yeah, I probably overstated this difference. Developers at a low-bono agency would surely have some autonomy, since they know their own strengths better. I could be way off, but my intuition is still that a) the barriers to both applying for funding and evaluating applications are sufficiently higher that there’d be substantially more free work—that was actually worth doing—than paid work (Peter Slattery’s given some nice further examples in a comment here though YMMV about high value these are) and b) the incentives from higher pay will be quite dominant over those from higher perceived value.
Yeah, I probably overstated this difference. Developers at a low-bono agency would surely have some autonomy, since they know their own strengths better. I could be way off, but my intuition is still that a) the barriers to both applying for funding and evaluating applications are sufficiently higher that there’d be substantially more free work—that was actually worth doing—than paid work (Peter Slattery’s given some nice further examples in a comment here though YMMV about high value these are) and b) the incentives from higher pay will be quite dominant over those from higher perceived value.