[ravenstine]

In addition to your last point, an employer may have good engineers and not even know it if their system discourages excellence. A lot of what the author mentions can cause good engineers to coast because merely changing a string can be an absolute slog of PRs, spurious feedback cycles, and code deciphering. Cash is king, so as long as an engineer gets paid and isn't totally driven insane, they'll stay just for the paycheck. Yet the whole time the employer has extra talent sitting there just being wasted.