I think the author wound have been very grateful if at least some of the seniors would have seen it as part of the leading task to craft some reward structure for their subordinates. Like that barber did. Life is so much nicer when money is for people, not the other way round.

The teams that brought value to the company were embedded alongside of the folks producing the data to be 'scienced' and had leadership that was able to understand and communicate the information (and its limits) to their leaders and adjacent teams and use their experience to point the data science folks in the right direction.