That was my initial thought too about this theory. In any tech company competent people are always the first ones to leave on first signs of trouble. They already have new opportunities lined up and they are just waiting for an excuse to leave and probably get a pay rise on their way out. High functioning people in general tend to have each others backs because they have more to give and it's just more fun to work being surrounded by capable people rather than use your time instructing people who never seem to get it and just leech your time.
In case I sound elitist, I don't think those competent people have any inherent trait that makes them that way, it's more to do with whether you know how to do deep work, it's something you can learn.
Using absolute links is the complete opposite of what you should do. If the page you are linking to lives in the same path, there is no reason not to link to it relatively. It makes the path structure more modular.
That but it's also pushed by superior availability. I don't know how many times I lay on my couch and do some information work on my phone instead of taking out my laptop and doing it there faster. Often the laptop is right next to me but it feels easier to pull out my phone instead of opening my laptop. I think it's mostly due to knowing that my phone is always with me. If I want to use my laptop, there's a possibility I have to physically move to get to it. So it's less work to go for my phone directly.
This all made me realize how hooked up I am to my phone. I take it literally everywhere I go even inside my house.
I've yet to meet a manager whose only job isn't a futile attempt to make themselves relevant to the process.
Only useful managers are those who are actually performing a dual-role as some sort of social lubricant for the team. You could just replace that manager role with a social engineer whose responsibility is to further psychological safety for everyone, and drop the pretense that they know anything about technology or manage what everyone should do.
Piketty also did good job in providing proof that the discourse Marx's capital started is still relevant today: wealth keeps concentrating and that will undermine the whole premise of democracy.
“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” ― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
This outcome is probably clear to anyone who has been paying attention, but the power of Piketty's book is in the way it lays out mathematical proof using pile of historical data as evidence.
The response to Piketty's book from ideological opposition have ranged from "So what?" to more valid attempts at asking theoretical questions about the validity of r > g, but nothing exactly that comes close to debunking the core thesis.
In case I sound elitist, I don't think those competent people have any inherent trait that makes them that way, it's more to do with whether you know how to do deep work, it's something you can learn.