You’ve nailed it. 15 years of experience here.

Scrum messed everything up too - lots of less-technical people needed jobs in software and that’s where they tend to slot in.

We would do better to think one level of hierarchy higher than the context we’re in more of the time. Doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for holism and design patterns (your mileage with the latter can vary of course).

Elegance is down and writing your own shitty code instead of using decent opinionated frameworks is up. Because people hate reading code.

If I’m frustrated I write code outside of work.

I tend to look for roles where there is serious, vertically integrated ownership of the code over time.

Spaghetti (or lasagna) is common and I can deal with it, unless the team worships the “clever” maniac who wrote it.

The one specific thing that will cause me to leave is micromanagement.

Thinking about moving closer to bare metal where there is less room for cruft and genuine tradeoffs have to be considered.

I made a PHP-based one a while ago before Duolingo offered Swahili. It probably needs a little upgrading, ha. A cool project and you can do it for most things. Oh plus it’s raw PHP so snappy as heck you youngins. https://github.com/ryanchausse/githeri