[vladms]

> and programmers turn those instructions into code that does something somewhere, usually after finding ways to avoid bad or unfeasible ideas, while still complying with the instructions.

Some do, but not all did that. With work-from-home I was staying at a friend of a friend that was a programmer and had a meeting. I was amazed about the level of simple things he was discussing, like "please add an error check, now you made a form where you can insert wrong data; make sure form is visible on a small screen, now it is not; etc.". And they talked ~2 hours about each, with the other person showing the guy exactly what it was not working. I do not know the history (maybe he was reconverting or something), but if this was what was he was doing usually, it was very inefficient and quite simple.

Most of my work was more similar to what you describe (fighting vague instructions and push back unfeasible ideas), but I wonder how much of "the industry" does this.

On the management I worked with all kinds, the employees have a small part of responsibility to look and select good organizations, otherwise power-hungry idiots arrive on top and start dictate and nothing crumbles because everybody just stays.