> The org in the article sounds like it's missing CTO/engineering management. Not necessarily. I’ve worked in a company where the CTO itself was encouraging th

> The org in the article sounds like it's missing CTO/engineering management. Not necessarily. I’ve worked in a company where the CTO itself was encouraging those employees. He established a clear list of goals to achieve to climb to the next seniority level. To be promoted you _had_ to do stupid shit like hacking the framework (which was Angular so I let you imagine the potential), be the architect of the project, or make company-wide presentations of your original solutions. Of course, a team full of people hacking things, trying to be the architectural leader and solving old problems with "invented here" solutions can’t really exist. So you were either in the promoted hackers camp or in the camp of people trying to do their job of delivering value and quality at the lowest cost, which in a CRUD SaaS business means that most of the time you just have to do the old boring things "by the book" that have proven to just work. But if you were in this camp you were seen as underperforming because you didn’t do what was expected but also you were underperforming for real because adding a single API in the back or a component in the front was just a hell of stupid work. The "high performers" were just the people who created this hellscape because since they invented it they’d be the only ones to have a full mental model of the team’s codebase. Now I just avoid any company who promotes their team as "the most talented engineers" because it’s either false or worse. I’d rather work with average coworkers who have a life outside computers and who just want the work done by 6pm.