Autonomy. I have only really ever had one opportunity to do whatever I wanted to the codebase. And the motto for our team was to make the best code that no on

Autonomy. I have only really ever had one opportunity to do whatever I wanted to the codebase. And the motto for our team was to make the best code that no one will ever see. With no goals other than "meet the customer requirements" and "make the code better", I had a lot of opportunity to improve on my ability to improve code in situ. Beyond that, job hopping. I have written software targeted at other software professionals, physicians and nurses, lawyers and paralegals, military and coast guard pilots and ground crew, rocket scientists, and military paperwork bureaucrats. Each time, it stretches out the arms of my "T-shape" a bit more. Nothing hurts me more than someone telling me that I can't work from my own initiative. "Do this, do it exactly this way, and do no more." That's guaranteed to stifle my personal growth, and to preemptively discard much of my expertise.