> People commit to their work and tell us when it’ll be done, if they fail we talk about it as a team. Team members quickly learn they must deliver and if they need help ask. We don’t delay timelines and I expected a clear “I think this will take days” if they need to delay, that’s fine, but they explain publicly and ask for help.

We have exactly the same strategy and it works very well.

> Those who were followers; who lacked discipline, failed faster and more obviously. Most software engineers produce more effort than they’re worth and skate by with meetings, “pair programming”, etc

This is so common and I am glad that remote work has been an effective extra filter. I mean, I don't mind mentoring junior devs, but also I am not a teacher and many of them seemed lacking total basics. Like they memorised algorithms but had no idea why they work or common issue was them just pasting code from Stackoverflow and then asking for help when it didn't work.