[ajkjk]

Lots of reasons mentioned here.

One big thing I think is overlooked is: the kind of people who start projects that succeed tend to be good engineers, and the kinds of people who jump onto them later tend to be less good. Not bad, per se, but just not as remarkable. Usually these people are plenty good at the business's needs: shipping features, fixing bugs. But not at the kind of holistic, visionary, motivated work required to unfuck a massive project.

IMO people who are mediocre programmers (which I kinda count myself among? I'm trying to be better but it's hard to keep the motivation up) don't understand how much better at this the really good engineers are because they're almost never exposed to them. You don't write code alongside the best programmers at your random corporate job, because the best programmers don't work there (or if they do, they usually aren't writing much code). The senior engineers are senior because they're adequate programmers and excellent shippers of products. Etc.