It still happens. Dev culture today is way more steeped in external status indicators than it used to be. It’s just naïveté and a need for some sort of hierarch

It still happens. Dev culture today is way more steeped in external status indicators than it used to be. It’s just naïveté and a need for some sort of hierarchy for engineering competence. Actually assessing it is hard and costly, so it gets outsourced. Everyone seems to conveniently ignore regression to the mean when it comes to the lionized companies because that would break their mental model, and potentially their end goal.