I agree with everything you have said and I have a mental game I play to quantify it. It's the "how many people could leave this company before anyone noticed?

I agree with everything you have said and I have a mental game I play to quantify it. It's the "how many people could leave this company before anyone noticed?" game. Software organizations have such good margins on capital they can afford to hire extraordinary quantities of dead weight before they become unsustainable. I've been at organizations where probably 75% of the software engineering org could be fired with no impact on creativity, growth, or maintenance efficacy. It's actually the efficiency of software that allows ineffective people to stick around without being noticed. Contra this article, I've noticed whole sections of the software industry deliberately float around organizations at scale. They're typically the people with a boatload of "ex-Cool Company" in their LinkedIn handles.