alt Hacker News> In fact, one of the better ways for an engineer to be labeled as "not independent enough for advancement" is a lack of curiosity about what you're building, because the lack of curiosity limits the engineer to a very narrow scope of work.
I don't think we're talking about the same topic at all. It sounds like OP is so curious that they made the whole thing up, and I think you might be out of touch with businesses that have plenty of tech workers, but aren't a tech company (most businesses around the world).
I think you're starting from the conclusion that the poster made it up and working back from there.
Nothing in that article reads implausible to me, both that they were building things like "desperation score" (probably not called that, probably called something like "commitment" or something) and that any reasonably intelligent and curious engineer would have understood what he was building.