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I've seen this at startups. Management starts off informal, and promotes people that have good visibility. In the early stage, these are people that quickly churn through feature lists and deliver solid code. Later, drunk on its own success, management continues to promote based on visibility. In a mid sized company, the most visible engineers are the ones that manage to ship broken code, then respond to nail-biter business continuity ending pages at 2AM. At this point, the engineers that built the product and keep the lights on vest out, are passed over for promotion, and then leave. In the next phase, the company's product stops delivering on its core competency, but hopefully it has monopoly leverage, so whatever. Finally, the big company has a come to Jesus moment, and tries to course correct. This step is fraught with peril. It rarely works, and instead usually leads to a revolving door of process-fiddling / agile-promoting execs. This happens because execs that could solve the problem necessarily realize the root issue is middle and upper management; organizational antibodies pick up on this and isolate such threats to the staus quo. The only execs that succeed at this point are the ones that somehow delegate 100% to low level managers and ICs while giving their peers the impression they are micromanaging and making massive organizational realignments or something. |