Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

- It is not X. It is Y.

- X [negate action] Y. X [action] Z.

The titles are giveaways too: Comfort Over Correctness, Consensus As Veto, The Nuance, Responsibility Without Authority, What Changes It. Has that bot taste.

If you want I can compile a list of cases where this doesn't happen. Do you want me to do that?

Business outcome comes first, and it is only rarely aligned with technical excellence. Closing a deal might involve making an unreasonable promise, and implementing it might not require more than an ugly hack, so you go with the ugly hack and make the money.

Comfort could be important but many people don't perform well when comfortable, so the organisation has to add some degree of confusion and pressure to keep them at a productive equilibrium where they don't fall into either apathy or burst into flames.

And yes, the boss decides, not because they are especially accountable or responsible, but because the power comes from ownership. In some organisations this is veiled and workers get a say most of the time, but in a pinch it'll be the higher-ups that actually have that power.

You mention the tradeoffs between rust. Including the high level of uncertainty and increased lead time as you need to learn the language.

The manager, now having that information, can insist on using rust, and you get er great opportunity to learn rust. Now being totally off the hook, even if the project fails, as you mentioned the risks.

In the first example, for example, they suggested a new metric to track added warnings in the build, and then there was a disagreement in the team, and then as a footnote someone went and fixed the warnings anyway? That sounds like the author might be missing something from their story.

As years pass, you are judged against the standard you set, and if you do not keep raising this standard, you start being seen as average, even if you are performing the same when you joined.

I've seen this play out many, many times.

When an incompetent person is hired, even if issues are acknowledged, if they somehow stay, the expectations from them will be set to their level. The feedback will stop as if you complain about same issues or same person's work every time, people will start seeing this as a you problem. Everyone quietly avoids this, so the person stays.

When a competent person is hired, it plays out the same. After 3/5/10 years, you are getting the same recognition and rewards as the incompetent person as long as you both maintain your competency.

However, I've seen (very few) people who consistently raised their own standards and improved their impact and they've climbed quickly.

I've seen people lowering their own standards and they were quickly flagged as under-performers, even if their reduced impact was still above average.