Good point, but it sounds like you’re disagreeing on the terms, not the ground reality of the situation.
Lots of companies can’t afford to compete with G / Fb / etc for principal engineers. (And many companies who should hire good people cheap out and don’t spend the money.) Thus lots of important, otherwise valuable projects are staffed by people who struggle to take technical responsibility for the tasks in front of them.
This becomes self reinforcing - senior engineers have a lot of market power. They (we) generally don’t enjoy working on projects with mountains of technical debt alongside the processes which have a track record of creating them. “You’re really talented. Why would you work at a bank / corporate?”
Lots of companies can’t afford to compete with G / Fb / etc for principal engineers. (And many companies who should hire good people cheap out and don’t spend the money.) Thus lots of important, otherwise valuable projects are staffed by people who struggle to take technical responsibility for the tasks in front of them.
This becomes self reinforcing - senior engineers have a lot of market power. They (we) generally don’t enjoy working on projects with mountains of technical debt alongside the processes which have a track record of creating them. “You’re really talented. Why would you work at a bank / corporate?”