The Bulk of Software Engineering Is Just Plumbing (2018)

Yes, absolutely agree. Small companies look for the best only to over-engineer solutions, and large companies will look for the best only to have them do a very tiny slice of engineering (since they hired an army of engineers) and fill the rest of the role with b.s. micromanagement tasks.

One small note I slightly disagree: > If an off-the-shelf solution exists, grab it, don’t build it from scratch.

I would say this is the one reason you would hire someone with all the fundamentals and technical expertise. The reason is because building things from scratch will make it domain specific, so it will be taylored to the problems the business is facing. Sure, if the businesss is just like hundreds of others which already have an off-the-shelf solution, then you could just use that, but more often than not you will have some kind of unique problem and this is were you need engineers to engineer systems. Instead companies will put you through intense interviews and then have a giant stack of your typical libraries that tend to have a lot of problems anyway.