So I work for a small defense contractor, for more than 2 years now. The means to success so far is almost entirely in the soft skills. It’s helpful to understand the technology but the soft skills are so much more important. It’s certainly the 80/20 rule.

Here is what I mean by soft skills:

* Actually caring about people. Checking up on your peers and seeing if they need help.

* Constant awareness of the people under your management. Having some idea of what they are working on where their pain points are. They should always know they can come to you if they have a problem.

* Tracking down undocumented requirements by actually talking to people and getting to know more people.

* Constant awareness of hot issues affecting major projects and operating status.

Since my business is technology contracting the business goal is to put people into employment and retain those people to the success of the client. The more I retain people the more successful I am to my employer. The inefficiency of the work is up to the client and coordinating business partners.

I started here as a developer and within a year was promoted to a manager. In the contract I am still a developer. The complexity there is that I operate in partnership with an another company who would prefer I were a junior developer even though I manage 15 seats. It’s still all about the soft skills.

This is how BigCo works. They are optimized for resilience and providing predictable cashflows for investors, not efficiency as such. If they had, say, 2 "10x" engineers who were brilliant and could do everything with no red tape or inefficiency, then one or both of them could leave, or demand pay raises, and the company would be screwed - it would be a very brittle, unsustainable period of efficiency.

So, it's better to have 20 1x engineers, with significant slack in the system, who are all interchangeable cogs in a machine that takes tickets in one end and pushes mediocre software out the other end. That way, if 5 or 10 of them leave, they can be replaced, and nobody will tell the difference. If there's a lean quarter, you can lay off half of them, and then rehire a bunch of average randos off the street a few months later, and again, nobody will be able to tell the difference.

Also, the mayor will visit the grand opening of the new office, and the media will write a lovely story about how many jobs have been "created", and the company will be able to negotiate some tax breaks for creating so many mediocre jobs.

You might find things are better at a mom & pop, or startup, or maybe outside of a big city.

They aren't incentivized to become inefficient, but once they grow large enough you get into a situation where everyone is playing a political game to minimize their own risk and effort.

And worse, the only people with motivation to fill the top tiers of the company are usually a little off. You essentially have to be a bit nuts to want to be C-level or above in a large corporation. I've seen it, there are employees who will ruthlessly seek out more money. Usually their competence levels aren't quite there, but they are the only people who want the job.

You have discovered Wally's playground. Wally is one of the guys from the Dilbert comic strip.

Basically, many incentives are "misaligned" in such a way, that micromanaging demise is (locally) considered more valuable than actually bringing in cash from customers by actually giving them something.

As long as the company's owners don't pick up on this and are effective at doing something about it, "all bets are off."

It sounds like you’re applying to enterprises rather than startups. There _will_ be a startup scene in your city, you just need to find it. Look for the meetups, gravitate to where the founders are, find out which meetups _they_ attend, and go network there.

It could be incentives to lower prices (race to the bottom from competition).