Yeah but what if the streak that motivated you was now "improved" - your annual bonus now depended on keeping that streak. You would be foolish to not have a l

Yeah but what if the streak that motivated you was now "improved" - your annual bonus now depended on keeping that streak. You would be foolish to not have a little dry powder in your stashes. Maybe get a week or so ahead and commit fixes from 5 days back, so that if you hit a gnarly bug today you have five days to fix it for real and your streak is not affected. There is no simple metric for "doing quality work" and any management that is not "i will sit down and read the code and understand it" is not real management. And this does not scale. And so quality, creative work does not scale. Hence clusters. And senior staff engineers. Oh and btw, staff engineers are the executives in software lead companies. any non-coding layers on top should be viewed as financiers - with some interesting organisational implications