This is a valuable lens to look at the engineering talent market through. But did they really characterize 'time spent refactoring' as 'lost productivity'?
This is obviously shortsighted for reasons most developers already understand.
It's an extreme point of view, sure, but in a perfect world this would be the case every time you build something.
On the opposite end of the spectrum you have to rewrite the entire codebase every time you interact with it to make it fit.
Reality is somewhere between those.
Yet the same people who hate devs spending time on refactors also laugh when you give them a six month estimate for feature X. I think "perfect" is "good enough" in this context. "Good enough" is always preferable to "non existent yet theoretically perfect".
I believe that what is missing more than anything in our industry is the veterans who have gained knowledge and wisdom through both the breadth and the depth of their past roles and can now do better than the previous generation. In real engineering fields or other scientific disciplines like medicine, there is a culture of learning from experience, and the people doing the most challenging jobs often have decades of it. In software development, we laughably call someone with 5 years of experience split between 3 different jobs "senior", and a lot of developers in their 30s are already looking for an escape hatch before ageism halts their career development.
So another good way to leverage developers might be to improve their working environment so they don't all quit just as they're starting to figure out what they're doing.
The real issue is there is not 1 correct way to write software but although we are understanding programming more than ever, we are still not great at quantifying and describing the values or requirements that drive our choice of process or even our selection of the right supplier to write it for us.
We had a bad experience from a supplier, not because they were rubbish or lacked skillsets or ethics but because they were not a good fit for the type of product we were building.
Sure. But they all move slowly and deliberately, mostly through careful evolution of good practices as new evidence and reasoned analysis become available. We don't throw out everything we've ever known about how to build reliable bridges every six months because someone thinks that suspending a paper bridge 200 sheets thick from orbiting satellites instead would be cool.
True game-changing developments do happen in software development, but they are quite rare. Most progress in industries like web development is illusory, and it's only a successful illusion because they people who have been around for a while and seen 99% of it before in other contexts have left.
Great, then we can save the money spent on version control as well!
I actually had someone suggest this to me as I was installing a VCS. ("Why don't you just write it correctly the first time?")