> The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_.

I wouldn't be so quick to judge the long tenured engineers. They probably realized that moving business forward is more important than writing artisan code.

You always have some young hotshot who comes in and wants to rewrite your old boring Java monolith into a micro services disaster for "better architecture".

The greybeards learned the life lessons the hard way.

The other aspect to consider is this: stay in this industry long enough and it will beat the soul out of you.