Their qualifications (talent, education, professionalism, experience, skills — TEPES) will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. In fact, there are IT organizations where just the opposite occurs; the quality of the IT engineers is quite high, and engineers who are mediocre or disruptive either don’t get hired or don’t last long if they are. I’m currently working on revised versions of two of my books (The Art of ‘Ware [Version 2.0] and Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering) while writing a new one (Surviving Complexity), from which this posting on the “Dead Sea effect” is a very, very tiny extract.