This is demonstrably not true. I work for large corporations, mainly banks. In this setting there are couple of ways for people with absolutely no ability to

This is demonstrably not true. I work for large corporations, mainly banks. In this setting there are couple of ways for people with absolutely no ability to code to get through the cracks. For example, one way this happens is through an external contractor vendor. These vendors are only interested in fulfilling contract requirements and typically will try to sneak developers with least ability they can get away with. As hiring process for vendor-supplied contractors is relaxed it is not at all difficult and will only depend on management of the team/project to prevent. Then, if it is no longer sustainable to keep particular developer on the project the vendor will not let go of the developer, it is more likely he/she will be rotated to another project. I have worked for a project in Credit Suisse where the "principal developer" was a person rotated from another project where she served as "development manager" and had many years of "experience" as Java developer before that. This person had only barest ability to code, she struggled to write a simple loop. When asked to add Json serializer to an application she was confused and wrote a bunch of code that concatenated strings to produce something not exactly resembling Json. She did not even have knowledge to spot the problems and would blame tools and other team members for parsing errors produced from parsing the code. Surprisingly, these explanations were accepted by the management as she had more "experience" than other team members. When I joined the team and spotted this situation I implored management to reevalute her as principal developer. The management had no development experience either and were taking her explanations on face value. They told me that I need to spend more time on the project to "learn the way they are doing things". Only after months of persuasion and showing countless examples of glaring incompetence I was able to succeed to resolve this problem. I find it not difficult to imagine more possible settings where people with no competence in coding can flourish when they can initially build a strong position for themselves and can exploit incompetence of their managers and peers. This is especially true for large corporations which have huge appetite to hire developers and huge budgets but also can have managers with no incentive to do their hiring very well. In one project I worked for the manager kept overseas staff even though it was net negative productivity because "higher management said so".