[austincheney]

The repeated pattern that I have observed is that companies want to hire talent. They screen for this in all the ways they can think of. Once hired though they really wanted mediocrity and trend followers, people reliant upon popular tools that do a measurably significant part of their job. This pattern seems common and repeatable for jobs dedicated to product development and not jobs focused on research or experimentation.

The described pattern is most explicit when the work performance expectations and means of execution directly contradict points and values expressed during the interview. These interview discussion points aren’t some slight hints, but are things raised intentionally by the candidate to avoid poor practice and these are things that win the candidate points during hiring selection.

I suppose the cause of this repeated pattern isn’t the management, at least not usually. The company really sincerely wanted to hire talent but cannot apply the talent they want and selected without raising some concern and insecurity from other employees. For this particular pattern of failure there is nowhere to mentor up, because typically management is not the problem and sympathize with the concerns. When management is the problem mentoring up is counter productive in that their insecurity increases. Typically the people experiencing this problem are less concerned with job security and more concerned with walking a tightrope between burning bridges and building products that resemble dumpster fires.