[zug_zug]

Agreed. I was formulating it as this (at a previous job, obviously)

There are 4 "top engineers." All 4 of these top engineers would identify each other as such.

There are 4 "D tier engineers." You'd rather have any ONE of the "top engineers" than ALL the "D tier" engineers.

These D-Tier engineers usually end up "managing" a rote manual process (e.g. calling a script sending emails in batches manually), when any "top tier" engineer would have written an automatic scripted solution that runs periodically, batches on an intelligent interval, logs its output, and automatically alarms if its results are anomalous (and done so in a week and moved on to a new project).