Yes. Don't forget "CV-first" development is a thing.
On the other hand, we also had difficulties hiring "good" engineers. People chose either a company with a brand name recognition or one that's working on "exciting" technology.
As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost.
As leaders, we fail to put our companies first.
This is an industry wide problem. If past trends of other major industries are any indicator, the whole "meritocracy" of tech industry will disappear within the next decade.
People established in their career don't need buzzword bingo resumes. Stability is important because you can leave the job at the door. Other things are more important, such as paying the mortgage, taking kids to the park on the weekends and not working all hours with a fragile stack.
And they'd be stupid if they didn't.
The issue is that, compared to other industries, it's really hard to find people with that 20% in tech, so business people are forced to let political and image ignoramuses (sometimes ignorant to the point of failing to perform basic hygiene) into the club, and forced to try to stuff them in the attic or some other dark corner of the office where they won't ugly things up too much.
Many developers naively interpret this as a ruling meritocracy. The reality is that the business types resent having to do this, and a horrible technology worker with some image consciousness will easily destroy his better-qualified peers.
I'm familiar with a case of a person who can't even code getting himself elevated to a technical directorship with architectural and high-level direction responsibilities through such tactics. He appears to code by merging branches in the GitHub interface, by making vacuous technical-sounding comments in meetings with executives, by occasionally having someone come "pair" with him and committing the changes they make together at his workstation, etc., but if you locked him alone in a room with a blank text editor and said "Write something that does this", he wouldn't be able to do it. And the executives believe in him wholeheartedly and are currently working to install him as the company's sole technical authority. All significant decisions would have to get his approval, despite his being literally the worst technician in the company. All of his decisions up to this point have been politically motivated, aimed at coalescing power within his group and blocking outsiders who may want to contribute.
He was able to get there because he dresses well, he adopted the executive's interests and chitchats with them about these, he walks around the office telling jokes and smiling at people, and generally being what would be considered personable and diplomatic, whereas the other technical people go to their desks, hunker down, and spend their day trying to get some real work done.
Which strategy wins in the long run?
I read countless anecdotes on HN and hear many more in person of people with just the shittiest managers, of people who rarely see "competent" engineering organizations, of people who have "never" seen a competent project manager, that it really is a wonder we have any profitable companies at all.
In reality, if you don't understand the value someone is providing them, you should make an effort to understand what they might be doing before making claims like the ones you're making.
On the other hand, I am pretty convinced that there is a sizeable number of people in companies who create a lot of busywork "managing" things. The project I am on has 3 developers (as far as I can tell) and probably more than 10 business analysts, project managers, architects and other managers putting their name on it. I have tried to understand what they are all doing but from what I can tell there are two managers who actually help the project and the other ones write reports to each other, call a lot of meetings but don't really contribute. They just regurgitate what the few active people are doing.
Once I was on a team with 2 QA analysts, 1 Eng Manager, myself as PM, 3 BA's (that I did not want), and 3 developers, and one platform architect. All this plus 1 director overseeing our tiny team. Not to mention the 1-2 BA's I worked with whenever I worked on something that impacted another team.
During my 1:1 with said director, I once lashed out - I hadn't slept well in 4 days and I simply sounded off. I literally said everything that's been said in this thread: everything from why the fuck do we have so many people, give me 5 engineers and fire everyone else, to all you care about is the headcount that reports to you.
Luckily, I was a top performer, and while this tarnished my reputation with this director, I was able to smooth things over over the course of a few months.
This director explained to me that I was no longer at a start up. That this team should be resilient - that anyone should be able to take 2-3 weeks off at a time without interrupting the work. That they didn't want us working pedal to the metal 100% of the time. That it was ok that it was slow, and that I shouldn't be so self-conscious or hard on myself if I wasn't always working my fingers to the bone.
Now, I still thought we had way too much fat. Some of those BA's had no business being on a technical team, even as BA's and we should have traded in the architect and dev manager for an extra QA and developer.
But what that conversation did was bring me back down to earth. So much of what we view as right and wrong is personal preference. While I still disagreed with the amount of waste, it removed the chip on my shoulder and now I simply make sure to join teams that I like.
That's more of a ramble, but gives you some context as to where I was coming from.
This, however, doesn't excuse hiring incompetent people based on appearance and likability with blatant disregard for their competence (I recognize that for many non-technical managers, it is difficult or impossible to discern the quality of one's skillset), nor does it excuse stuffing teams with dead weight just because the hiring manager personally likes the people involved. And those practices are indeed rampant.
The company has zero loyalty to you and will screw you over if it makes business sense to do so. There is absolutely no reason to put the company above your career interests.
As said in this topic - it's true that in some places, resume-driven development pays off for the developers. It's not the same everywhere and to me it looks more like a symptom of a dysfunctional structure than par for the course in business.
This means it is in your career interests to increase company revenue and/or reduce costs, because this will make you more attractive to many companies (the ones we would likely want to work on) when you move on.
That's just my personal impression but I believe you have better chances coming from an unsuccessful company with all the right buzzwords than from a successful company with old tech. You will quickly be labelled as "dinosaur".
The real winner is to use cool stuff AND come from a successful/known company.
I have no experience in being labelled a 'dinosaur', but I'm sure there are jobs where being practical and generating actual results will matter. In ideal conditions, these are the jobs which are desirable to work at, so I don't like the idea of optimizing for hotness in itself (at least for my own career decisions).
Not everything should build their resume, but some of it has to. It's one of my arguments for buy over build.