[sophonX]

You should mention, what kind of teams you've worked with and what kind of stuff you've built. Every team has different requirements and hiring bar. In my previous company the low bar caused not so good (able to understand stuff, knowledge and connect dots) people be a burden to rest of team. Heck in 2 years, 4 important people have left the team due to hiring a bad manager (has neither tech nor soft skill(s)).

There wasn't growth in that team due to mediocre hiring and eventually all the good ones - left to other companies.

My current team is an infra platform and has lot of growth as IC. Everyone is learning something in-depth and are explorers - rather than blind sheep. The bar here is higher than the one for my previous team.

Our team requires you to know about whatever you talk on, not just usage but it's internals - why ? That's what we do daily. It can be about scheduler, checkpointing, auto scaling, concurrency, different data structures & algos, integrating with ecosystem, etc.

Even soft skills - like helping others, taking feedback, communicating clearly, etc.

Yeah so, mediocre will always be a burden to team.