[agentgumshoe]

The other key factor is probably the person hiring/hiring being able to identify a 'good' programmer. Whether that's through their own competence or having some knowledge of the candidate outside their resume.

Speed to market is also a factor. If you pushing to release a new product, good engineers are very important. For big corporates with established marketshare and profits, it seems to be the thousand monkeys with typewriters approach

[bitwize]

Indeed. I've noticed that the more off the critical path is the corpo's software team, the more waste they are willing to tolerate when it comes to software development. That's how you come to things like super-scalable, cloud-based, kooberneteez-orchestrated microservice architectures for internal applications which serve a subset of a division of a company. And you need a team 200 strong to service that.