Wholeheartedly agree with you on team composition mattering a ton, but how often do you have such an abundance of engineers and tasks that you can match them up the right way?

I think if you get to know your engineers, you can figure out the right pairings to bring out the best. But this requires intimate knowledge and probably subjective based on how good the manager is at managing coders. So I guess from up high, stack ranking-based firing is easier.

But I think it is also cheaper to make great teams rather than just doing brutal firings all the time. But it may be a micro-optimization?