[throwaway82931]

For what it's worth, I'm actually a senior IC who's cleaned up plenty of messes over decades and who enjoys migrating legacy systems. In my experience, it's the management-level architecture astronauts who don't understand loose coupling who do the most harm. The damage done by low level individuals can be contained if they're working on properly isolated subsystems (which of course requires competent management to set up).

And I'm cynical all right. I used to believe that I could be part of a "we're all in this together" team. But I've realized how rare that is after bad experiences at multiple companies where management sees an antagonistic relationship with engineering as inevitable — because they agree with you that "grunts can't be trusted".