In my case, I might've been lucky, though. One of the co-founders had a CS degree and deeply valued the productivity boost we got from custom software.
Surprisingly enough, the company was not Oracle.
over the long term I would think that two things will happen: good devs will leave the company while the remaining fight an uphill battle maintaining code until the customers leave.
but ofc sales and incentives in general are a whole different area of problems.
This policy was also useful for retention. Other firms in the area knew that he fired all of the good devs, so they never tried to poach his employees. In fact, if you got tired of the toxic environment and quit, the firm's name on your resume meant that you probably weren't going to get another dev job without leaving town. When a dev sees their former colleagues making sandwiches at Subway, another weekend of unpaid overtime doesn't sound as bleak.
This. A mentor told me, “[As a software developer], never work for a company with a CEO who has never pushed code to production.”
I think you miss some good places to work by following that advice, but you avoid a ton that are worth avoiding.