A lot of this rings true for me. A few years back I worked for a company that seemed hell bent on utterly demoralising its engineering organization. Think endless rules (even down to which HTTP verbs you were allowed to use), a Macbook Air for development work, releases that very literally required manager signoff coupled with a company culture that was very partial towards throwing engineers under the bus. Of course they were crippled by technical debt, outdated development practices and regularly plagued by production fires. They did make a lot of bad hiring decisions - helped largely by not conducting technical interviews. But even those of us who were competent felt like 0.1xers.