This was the money quote.

Teams do big stuff.

Good teams do good big stuff (very good).

Bad teams do bad big stuff (very, very bad).

It seems that the hyper-competitive nature of today's workplace means that engineers consider their own teammates to be "competition," and we never really get a good team. This is especially true, with the mayfly tenures of most engineers, these days.

I'm fairly happy with the fact that I was able to keep a stable team of experienced, high-performing, senior C++ image pipeline engineers together, for decades.

Other managers would bust my chops for being a "Santa Claus" manager, because I refused to burn them out, and often intervened, when other managers were being too hard on them.

It seemed to work. When my team was finally rolled up, in 2017, the engineer with the least tenure had a decade.