[techslave]

I think this comment misses the point by being myopic.

The great majority of devs are not very good. (Same for managers.) Here at HN you are only seeing the pretty good to great devs. Not boot camp grads and unranked school grads.

The other thing is that this comes from the management school of management. One where managers mentor ICs and managers drive skill growth. As opposed to the SV ideal (rarely met) where mgmt gets out of the way. They remove blockers, not give opportunities. They communicate information, not hoard it.

So, from the management school of management style, managing lackluster devs (the 90% that you reject at phone screen), it’s true. These devs get in over their head when the first thing they have to do is actually understand the spaghetti codebase. This is not a road to success for these devs.

With that POV and that reality in mind, the advice is sound.