The tech industry deeply believes in bottom-up meritocracy.

Good ideas can come from even junior engineers.

I wonder how much of this culture is downstream of the historically supply-constrained engineering labor market?

Companies are incentivized to treat engineers like an end in and of themselves, like the most precious thing in the world, because if engineers feel like they own it they will give their discretionary effort, and they won't go to another employer who will treat them even better.

I wonder if this will change given that engineering talent is now more demand constrained.

As someone who believes fundamentally in the power of emergence, I hope not!