What I mean is: say there is a startup with non-technical founders. They outsource development to some web shop to do a proof of concept or something. Later pro

What I mean is: say there is a startup with non-technical founders. They outsource development to some web shop to do a proof of concept or something. Later product proved to be valuable, so they hire a CTO of some sorts or even just an engineer. They have no idea what is a good CTO or engineer is when they do hiring. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not. In "not so well" scenario, the company ends up with weak engineers that don't have a lot of experience. They might have 20 years of making marketing websites at website mil with Drupal or maybe even Django, but zero experience in software development. Those people, either don't know what a good engineer is or they are afraid to hire someone noticeably better than them - so the team ends up stuffed with not so good engineers. Maybe by luck they hire a good engineer eventually, but a good engineer will look at all that mess and will bounce really quick unless the pay is worth it. As an anecdote, I worked with a very good engineer recently, but her team was weak - on her 1:1 she was told to not be so strict during her PR reviews. Reviews she was making, unlike mine, were very polite and people still complained about her being too strict (she wasn't it was bare minimum). When a strong engineer is interviewing a candidate - they know what to look for and willing to look the other way when it comes to personality. (that sometimes end up in toxic engineering team culture, but that's another issue) I also worked with strong engineers that would refuse to hire engineers that are better than them (it was unnoticed for some time). A lot of SRE complaints are coming because they have to babysit weak engineers and hold their hands. Management thinks that the solution to this is to hire junior SREs to deal with it, but the real solution is to reduce need for babysitting. For context, I'm a sysadmin that ventured into software development and now doing SRE work and honestly, there are a lot of days when I wish to go back to software development.