[Sirenos]

I'm glad to see this sentiment more vocally expressed lately. It's certainly nothing that hasn't been said before, but I think that reality hasn't caught up to the frustrations faced by knowledge workers. Imagine training as a musician, learning the fundamentals, and mastering your craft, only to be used as a glorified set of fingers for playing chords.

This discussion tends to get muddled whenever I bring it up with others because it's seen as an inability to be a team player, or that I'm just trying to daydream instead of "get things done", but my retort is always that you can't know what to get done until you have done the day-dreaming. We need it back.

[pschuegr]

I'm torn about this one. I personally (like most devs) am hyper-productive when I am focused on a problem that I'm interested in solving. But that often does not align with whatever is the most important for the company or the team or whatever is highest on the priority list. So yeah, I'd enjoy my job more if I could just work on fixing something that seems broken to me.

On the flip side, I've worked with a lot of folks who are way more interested in just... writing... more... code. And I would never give those people free reign, because in about two months you'd have doubled the size of your codebase, your complexity, and the amount of people you need to manage it.

[disgruntledphd2]

Yeah and then you end up with a manager who hacks out a complicated solution to problems we don't have and ships it to prod.

And obviously you can't tell them it's a terrible idea because they're your manager.