Worst people got the most pay. Most people paid very poorly. Had layoffs at a moment when everyone was already neck deep in far too much work? Tons of miscommunication, many people don't care enough to fix persistent problems, because they are too stressed by workload. Quality occasionally suffers, because upper management pushes company to grow so untenably fast that we are never not in a rush to get things out the door on time. Too few engineers, they are very stressed, and too many of them just let problems go unsolved, so they fall heavily on lower level employees (mostly this is the R&D engineers, production engineers also get saddled with this burden).