DRY has become a mantra throughout the industry. Any time repetitive code shows up, DRY gets applied as a cure all. If you even start to question DRYing up a piece of code, you are viewed as a heretic to the entire industry.
Ok, maybe it’s not that bad, but many times DRY gets applied without much thought. This careless application of DRY leads to brittle code, making even simple changes scary because they could have a huge ripple effect.
The example is more of an issue with using the right tool for the job: using classes inheritance and overloading would properly deal with the employee/manager/c-suite distinction.
For sure there are better abstractions that would help. I still think that they only help with over abstraction to a certain point. Digging 5 classes deep just to figure out what’s actually happening is just as, if not more, frustrating than digging 5 functions deep.