This has been my experience as well. The best places to work are where they actually have a lot of interesting problems to solve and work to be done in order to grow and be profitable.
A lot of companies are not doing that, and in many cases developer hiring and team management is more driven by things like internal company politics, or the desire to use a hiring budget by the end of the year for example.
Also it is sometimes the case that an organization's software development needs are not persistent. Sometimes there are weeks or even months where the bottleneck of the company is far from software development, and until those problems are figured out there's little for the developers to do, but they're on a salary so they have to come in and do their hours anyway. That can be awkward to talk about when those developers are being paid up to a half a million dollars per year.
A lot of companies are not doing that, and in many cases developer hiring and team management is more driven by things like internal company politics, or the desire to use a hiring budget by the end of the year for example.
Also it is sometimes the case that an organization's software development needs are not persistent. Sometimes there are weeks or even months where the bottleneck of the company is far from software development, and until those problems are figured out there's little for the developers to do, but they're on a salary so they have to come in and do their hours anyway. That can be awkward to talk about when those developers are being paid up to a half a million dollars per year.