The meat is in the footnote, as always. > (In fact, when the job is far from trivial technically and/or socially, programmers' horrible training shifts their f

The meat is in the footnote, as always. > (In fact, when the job is far from trivial technically and/or socially, programmers' horrible training shifts their focus away from their immediate duty – is the goddamn thing actually working, nice to use, efficient/cheap, etc.? – and instead they declare themselves as responsible for nothing but the sacred APIs which they proceed to complexify beyond belief. Meanwhile, functionally the thing barely works.) It seems the author has been plagued with programmers who avoid taking responsibility. One strategy for creating job security is to build a system too complex for anyone else to maintain it. Perhaps the author's colleagues are using this strategy. It's hard to take complaints about "best practices" seriously when the practices described are not best.