whiskytango111

I agree that it’s worse in like 99% of cases that 1% though overly influenced my word choice :)

To your other point, I wasn’t trying to be as hand wavy as that came across.

There will always be people who make mistakes or are not good fits for their job (engineers, management, execs, investors, etc).

Maybe a better way to say it is that low impact work happens at the tail end of bad management. It’s usually a luxury problem (pet projects from a company that makes too much money but has too little maturity) or a symptom of terrible management (no clue what is valuable or worse unable to actually get team to work on what is valuable)

Companies only want people that are in he A bucket. That’s what market rate is.

If you aren’t actually and truly in the A group then your company is thinking about how to pay you less, replace you eventually, or invest in other people who likely will become part of the A group.

That’s just bad management. High quality work that doesn’t actually move the business needle is almost the same as if people didn’t even come in at all.

That said managing a large organization is extremely hard. I don’t think most companies have the overall business dynamics to sustain a large company where teams can do things that don’t matter. Usually those companies, which there are a lot in the tech world, have something else going on (no product market fit and too much cash) that leads to those symptoms

As an SVP of Eng: Market dynamics and pay equity mostly force me to pay everyone the same. Not everyone gets paid the same but little disparity between people of high impact and low. Ie most companies total annual comp between people is a lot smaller than you’d think.

So the job of management is to weed out people who aren’t having as high as possible impact when convenient.

I don’t like it, but it’s often what’s going on

Not disagreeing with your perspective but as an exec here is my perspective

A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan).

B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense.

The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.