This explains so much of my career except I worked at mega .coms instead of start ups.

My concurrent observations:

* Most corporate developers are really shitty with about 15% carrying about 80% of the load that keeps the lights on.

* The only goal is reducing the cost of hiring in a world without human standards or qualifications. Of course that just means transferring costs elsewhere.

* In a world of shitty developers raising the bar on quality and minimally acceptable work products just alienates the work force.

* The ultimate compromise is to outsource as much work as possible to open source and never write original software. This is Invented Here Syndrome where nothing internal is ever trusted and almost everything external receives some minimal level of automatic trust by default. What could possibly go wrong?

>Do you know of a way to test leadership for their attitude towards quality? Let me know.

They must have proven ability themselves to perform at higher quality levels than required by the current situation.