I am not confounding good work with good people. I very often see great people deliver poor work. I rarely see bad people. I can be a great person and want to succeed at something I am I’ll equipped to do professionally, or for whatever reason am not fully engaged in.

Personally, yes, I feel working for a paycheck only is a sure sign of a bad fit/attitude. Maybe I have an unrealistic view, but I think people should work for more than that, or else find a more rewarding and engaging profession...life is too short to punch the clock (ymmv).

While very few intentionally make mistakes, I find it takes extraordinary effort to maintain the discipline to intentionally not make mistakes. A mistake is not always an erroneous action, it can be the omission of careful attentive proactive action.

My thesis (and practical experience) is that you can deliver good software with ineffective teams, contrary to the myth of 10x rock star hire-only-the-best mantras. But my question is how others use tools and techniques to reliably do this vs. gut feel and trial and error. I know it can be done, just as I know you can hire 10x coders and still fail a project.

Edit/postscript: you can also have (and often do) great people who as individuals can be highly effective, but fail to communicate or collaborate as a team. This is probably more common in larger orgs or in my specific cases, teams that span multiple orgs. You often have to manage great people who are poor communicators via nudges without direct hiring/firing or performance review leverage...aka “dotted lines”.