You're still putting words into people's mouths. No one said none of the good engineers get promoted, they said that being a good engineer is not sufficient to be promoted. A good engineer who is also good at playing promotion games would presumably do very well.
PragmaticPulp specifically said the engineers his team hired were actually rather good, just had bad habits:
> The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it.
PragmaticPulp specifically said the engineers his team hired were actually rather good, just had bad habits:
> The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it.