I think you make a valuable point here, but I don't think that quality and productivity are mutually exclusive. I often encounter engineers or teams who are putting just as much time and effort, or more, into 'making it work' as it would take a more skilled engineer or team to achieve both.
Most of the time they aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s just as fast for me to write maintainable code that is well designed and for me to write some scripts to automate deployment and Cloud Formation templates to automate infrastructure deployment. But I’m only one person. If they want something done fast, I can spin up a team of barely competent programmers who know how to create web pages that meet the spec and outsource a bunch of manual QA testers instead of writing automated test and let them test the code that we write during the day when they come to work while we are sleep (outsourced it’s daytime for them).
Despite the talk of the 10x developer, sometimes you just need bodies.
I can do front end, middle tier, database admin work, AWS net ops, dev ops, and development, talk to CxOs about strategy, mentor developers, lead a team etc. and I have done all of those things. But, I can’t do it all at once.
