[throwaway82931]

> they are usually right.

This message encapsulates why so many software jobs are terrible. Put your heart and soul into doing your best, earnestly combat NIH and pursue meaningful productivity, and _still_ the culture is such that at many companies, there will never be trust because the prevailing culture is that management is "usually right" that grunts can't be trusted.

I've worked for good bosses that aren't like this, but they're hard to find.

[Too]

What's difficult is that usually half the team of grunts can be trusted to run their own race, the other half can be completely clueless and need explicit guidance, even if they are decent programmers otherwise.

If you were to allow everyone to innovate freely, some would spend several weeks learning the latest shiny fad and creating things of no or negative value, like using AI to generate commit messages or adding service mesh to your single container kubernetes cluster. The disconnect from business value and writing code for the sake of writing code can be astonishing. Conversely, if you let loose one smart guy in the team, it may seem unfair to the rest of the team.

A good leader is the one who balances the need and utilizes the best of both these sides.

[throwaway82931]

You’d think from this thread that the messes inevitably originate from ”grunts” wandering off the reservation. In my experience the source has often been “innovation” imposed from above, in the form of buzzword-driven development championed by semi-technical leadership enamored of this poisonous “grunts can’t be trusted” ideology.

[foobarian]

Clean up enough messes left behind by grunts that were trusted by management and you will be cynical too :-)

[throwaway82931]

For what it's worth, I'm actually a senior IC who's cleaned up plenty of messes over decades and who enjoys migrating legacy systems. In my experience, it's the management-level architecture astronauts who don't understand loose coupling who do the most harm. The damage done by low level individuals can be contained if they're working on properly isolated subsystems (which of course requires competent management to set up).

And I'm cynical all right. I used to believe that I could be part of a "we're all in this together" team. But I've realized how rare that is after bad experiences at multiple companies where management sees an antagonistic relationship with engineering as inevitable — because they agree with you that "grunts can't be trusted".

[aiisjustanif]

I still blame the management here for not building a team where quality and foresight matter enough to avoid large messes.

Trust from management isn’t all that is needed for good work to be accomplished, good managers of software development also should not shockingly know good software development.

I swear software and tech related roles are one of the few places where the managers don’t also know how to do the job of their reports.

[oopsallmagic]

Concur. It's an unfortunate race to the bottom which is just indicative of the dilution of ability in this godforsaken industry. Why can't a team of grunts manage a basic CRUD web app? That's what's so frustrating: most of these problems aren't even _hard_, and yet devs screw them up anyway.

Signed, a greybeard sick of cleaning up messes.