I fully believe that the Jack Welch style stack ranking school of management, performance and skills acquisition was a very expensive cultural mistake in modern

I fully believe that the Jack Welch style stack ranking school of management, performance and skills acquisition was a very expensive cultural mistake in modern corporate culture, perhaps one of the worst. The idea of stack ranking or internal competition is so naive and practically ineffective that it's no surprise it was an utter disaster in nearly every instance its been implemented -- it's also no surprise that it has been broadly recanted from most large tech firms that once implemented it, as well as disavowed by its original inventor! That's what makes this article (and series) frustrating. It ignores that corporate software engineering is a team sport. Individual contributors need and deserve coaching and constructive working environment to unlock their true potential. But who is responsible for that? Is "everyone equal" or is it the case that the executives highest in the hierarchy are also responsible for the outcomes? I would say it's the latter. Are you a leader that's tired of expert beginners on your team? Take a look in the mirror. You hired them (or chose to retain them). You failed to provide them with the mentoring they needed to grow. You failed to build a constructive environment for them to be an engineer. And sometimes, most damningly, you failed to select the right kind of company or industry for your professional working style, goals, or preferred compensation. The truth is, if you didn't fail in any of these ways, you would never see any of these things you complain about! Being a leader is hard, but doing it properly makes such a disproportionate binary impact on the ability of the organization to function properly that it's almost always my first (and often my last) question I need to ask to assess an organization. I'd like to see an end to these kinds of think-pieces and I'd highly recommend that folks who want real solutions to these problems (whether you're an IC or not) look elsewhere. By no means do I have the all the answers here, but a great place to start is one of my favorite books about engineering management: Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path.