"It is a cold Anzac day in Melbourne, and I am brooding." I'm in Sydney, and Lest We Forget. "It has become exceedingly clear to me that the average company is not a suitable environment for someone that cares about the craft of programming." I'm not in a position to do this topic justice as it's a too big a subject to cover in a post such as this. Nevertheless, l'd extend that statement to include essentially any cr…
> The worst case comes when the stated objectives of the company or organization (what it does to make money) are very different to those of the employee's skills. For instance, the employee is employed in some technical area of a company that has nothing to do with technology such as banking, finance, the arts and various government bureaucracies. > My worst job was working for a government bureaucracy that had noth…
> In my opinion, for such a situation it would make sense for the management to apply a more hands-off approach with respect to managing the technical employees. If you don't understand what they are doing, employ great people that you trust and let them do their technical things in a rather hands-off way.
This never works. I work in a place with a bunch of very competent people (not perfect, but good), and there are still so many people trying to "dig the moat" -- own a project where they can do whatever stupid shit they want. They leave years later and senior managers are told about the mess they left behind. Can you imagine what happens where most people are average or less?