I think so. I’ve worked at bad, average and good places, but the bad places tend to be larger and far less efficient, so they have to hire more engineers to make up for the inefficiency.

And they don’t necessarily pay well either. They see engineers as powerless cogs who have to do what they’re told, so they get paid like that too. And then they complain they can’t find seniors.

The many pointless presentations I’ve given about tech debt and code quality. Argued for redesigning poorly designed systems. They don’t care. Just churn out more features to cross off the list, and why do those features take so long?