In my own experience, the development process is usually to blame, more than the developers themselves, their capabilities (or lack thereof) or their paycheck.

In my own experience, the development process is usually to blame, more than the developers themselves, their capabilities (or lack thereof) or their paycheck. The project I work for depends highly on usually inexperienced developers and we're using a development process that is task-oriented but at the same time based on continuous feedback and regular code reviews. Should it be any other way, things would quickly degenerate. That's what happened before I arrived, and we're still (years later) recovering from the damage that that has caused to the code base. Outside the IT industry, most bosses don't want to hear about code. Coding is actually seen as a pretty trivial step in many cases. It's OK to hire an intern to add new feature X. Writing good code is not properly rewarded - as long as it works, it's stable, no-one complains, it's OK. Not to mention stuff such as niche technologies, that usually create a barrier to entry that would-be employees have to overcome, thus concentrating the know-how, power and pay in the hands of a few bored people that won't bother learning the next thing.