I'm so glad to see this article on the HN front page. It's spot on and it's what makes coding such a difficult career and why it feels so non-meritocratic. It's

I'm so glad to see this article on the HN front page. It's spot on and it's what makes coding such a difficult career and why it feels so non-meritocratic. It's happened to me a couple of times that I had to work under the leadership of someone who was far less skilled than me. It's a painful experience and it can take over a year for non-technical directors to figure it out; also, by the time they start to suspect something is wrong, they may have become friends and don't want to admit to themselves that their chief engineer is simply not good. It's easy to say "Well, just quit and join a different company" but this trivializes how incredibly widespread this problem is across all companies including very financially successful ones. They have a huge amount of money; they can throw thousands of engineers at any problem; they don't need to be efficient to stay afloat and they usually aren't... And usually companies which are already earning a lot of money don't care about anything other than merely staying afloat - Everyone is just coasting along thanks to their market monopolies. In my last role, I was presented with what could have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It could have worked out really well but it worked out terribly because the top engineer was not qualified for the job and neither were the founders. It's not like I can just turn around an find another opportunity like that the next day; it took 10 years and a lot of things had to line up exactly right to get that opportunity. This was the best financial opportunity I had come across in over a decade. I still think it could have worked out very differently. Talent and skills don't attract such financial opportunities in this industry; it's all about luck. It's not even about social connections because people in this industry have an obsession with 'warm introduction' and this creates a huge amount of friction - It's literally impossible to socially network your way to a good opportunity; if you don't try hard enough, you won't get any opportunities. If you try too hard, investors or founders will feel threatened by you - It will make them uncomfortable. This industry is full of sheep; they're terrified to do anything differently than their peers, it doesn't matter how rich they are. They have FU money but they're terrified to say FU. It makes 0 sense to me. For the average person who is or aspires to be above average, the tech industry is a kafkaesque nightmare. You have to be content with being average and rolling the dice. This means you have to content yourself with mediocrity and work on your people skills instead.