I like your theory, which seems to explain a lot of things (like why I'm not attracted to such organizations, for example). Especially the last part: In fact

I like your theory, which seems to explain a lot of things (like why I'm not attracted to such organizations, for example). Especially the last part: In fact these organizations want weaker people at the bottom doing the grunt work as they are easier to control: They are all about figuring out how to build systems out of interchangeable cogs, under the premise that if you do enough build engineering then you can take almost any competent coder and get at least some contribution out of them (even if you end up needing ten times as many employees as a tradeoff). Corollary being: if the work itself is structured so that much of it is viewed as "grunt work" - then by definition, the people stuck doing it (L3s in this case) are viewed disdainfully.