But I think that really invalidates this whole premise that there is no such thing as 'A' players and that they are primarily a product of the tooling and envir

But I think that really invalidates this whole premise that there is no such thing as 'A' players and that they are primarily a product of the tooling and environment. Teams with shit code and poor unproductive environments, pretty much by definition, don't have 'A' players and the ones they do have don't stay long. Someone once told me "it's easy to retain mediocrity in a company, it's the talented people that are hard to keep." This is a chicken-and-egg problem, but in my mind it is the lack of quality team members and managers that leads to a poor environment all around. That being said I've worked in environments like this, where tooling was poor, the build chain almost non-existant and there was a legacy of extremely poor architecture. I was still able to make improvements, bring in better code, architectures and dev practices (albeit slowly). For that matter, so was every other 'A' player I know that worked there. The main thing is none of us stayed there more than a year.