This seems like giving up. The article is right about the problems but seems temperamentally opposed to actually fixing them. Number of people under you is a terrible metric in many ways, but it is at least objective (ish) and hard to fake; so is years of experience. If you take the position that programming skill requires years of particular kinds of learning and there is no way to assess whether someone with x years on their CV has actually done y years of that kind of learning... well, maybe that's true, but what's the actionable takeaway from that?
I don't disagree. That said, the first step in solving a problem is to understand that there is one and what are its root causes.
EDIT: I think sometimes to goal of some prose is to be thought provoking, i.e. to allow us to find somebody else who perhaps will find a better solution if only they had been stimulated enough to care about a problem
When you interview a line manager and he boasts that he led a team of 100 engineers, do you question that he could have done the job with 10 better-picked engineers?
You get what you measure. If you reward bloat, you get train wrecks.
