[joallard]

I've seen exactly this in a local well-regarded startup. Incompetent hires with problematic behaviors thriving and being protected, and competent hires being unprotected, not cared about, and almost pushed out.

They would hire almost anyone, and then not take active action in maintaining a healthy staff. Needless to say, it's not going very well over there, regardless of the CTO being quite technically proficient.

[ihsw2]

Incompetent PMs can be an issue too, between inaccurate/incomplete feature planning and shoving their responsibilities onto unwitting developers. I'd argue that a great PM is worth as much as the much-vaunted 10x developers, if not worth much more.