"but fails to realize that the developer they are talking about simply has no say" I agree with you, and in particular this. My experience in craporate IT is e

"but fails to realize that the developer they are talking about simply has no say" I agree with you, and in particular this. My experience in craporate IT is exactly that. I've had a number of projects where we had a very specific set of operational requirements (platform, OS, database, web server), and couldn't get even a hint about anything vaguely resembling a functional requirement. I've even had "emergency" projects where it was suddenly critical that we deliver right away! But the same people complaining that we were late couldn't tell us what the software was supposed to do. One company I worked for didn't tell the development team about some software we were supposed to develop (as it turned out, this software was supposed to be part of the company's flagship product, but no one knew what it was or what it was supposed to do) six months AFTER it was supposed to have been shipped. There's really no way any developer could ever actually add value to a place like that, no matter how skilled and how motivated.