The issue is that the average skill level for programmers is so low that if you have someone with genuine skill you want them guiding the rest. I just watched

The issue is that the average skill level for programmers is so low that if you have someone with genuine skill you want them guiding the rest. I just watched a developer get promoted to tech lead for no other reason than his output was literally 4x everyone else on his team. He's either going to continue doing what he's doing now and continue running circles around everyone or he's going to actually attempt to improve them and his own productivity is going to plumet. I don't want to take away from this developers skill, he's a very competent developer, but he's not a diamond in the rough, everyone around him is just that fucking bad. We're talking "lets send this list into an API via json as a comma delimited list instead of a JSON array and manually split it out in the code" levels of bad. Before experiencing this I never fully understood why people treat developers the way they do. You can't trust these jackasses for shit and what makes it worse is that everyone has gotten so used to their slow output that they think it's normal and that this 4x developer is a phenom. you really could probably replace these jackasses with a single strong developer and AI, and it's no wonder people are so excited to do so. good developers will always be valued, the issue is that when tech became a popular career we got a glut of shit.