Man, I really love the discussions you guys have here, and I think AjarnMark really summed up my intent to not focus on how things should be, but rather on how to deal with the way things really are. It took me a long time to get to that point in my own career.

David, Tom and Scorpion also make a lot of good points. It's true, as Tom points out, that if programmers ran the farm, we'd probably never ship anything either, for completely different reasons. Deadlines and discipline are required to bring anything to completion. However, I frequently question how much discipline most middle management possesses. I think David's point is also pretty on the money that the more layers of management you have, the less likely techies will be heeded. I've worked in both huge and tiny shops and that's very much the case. And as for Scorpion's question about managers sitting at your desk, I find that to be directly proportional to the size of the company and the Dilbert factor.

ckempste also touches on something that I emphasize frequently. What he refers to as "future thinking" is analogous to a degree to my assertion that the root of all evil in the corporate world is shortsighted thinking, particularly in software development. While some of his bullet points sound a bit like Corporate-Speak (don't hurt me, please! ), the points are nonetheless valid. You should write the article you mentioned – we can use all the help we can get!

Things have been so busy of late that I have to drop in and kind of batch process my comments, but I just wanted you guys to know how much I enjoy the interaction. I do a lot of tweaking to the seminars & training we do on based on what I hear from Real Programmers in the Real World. Nobody knows what really goes on out there like you guys do!

Chistopher Duncan

Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)

http://www.showprogramming.com/TheCareerProgrammer.asp