>few good employees quit because they are unhappy. >From what I have seen, it is usually some political or administrative mistreatment that ends up being "the

>few good employees quit because they are unhappy. >From what I have seen, it is usually some political or administrative mistreatment that ends up being "the straw that broke the camel's back". That makes them unhappy. It's rampant in the US. Programming is a creative endeavor, but most managers only know prod-ops or call center type management. You can't manage creatives that way. We actually had a guy a couple companies ago try to get developers to do time cards like at McDonalds. Another guy decided developers didn't deserve offices, so he kicked all the developer leads out and brought managers from another group to take their offices. That made our DBA of 5 years resign, and he was the best I've ever seen. It's like they don't even consider the effects their decisions have on morale; completely oblivious. I think scrum makes development miserable, but it's a lot of shit. If I work a few 60-80 hour weeks, I don't expect to be scolded for leaving early once crunch time is over, yet it happens over and over again. There's all kinds of stupidness in corporate America. It didn't used to be like this. Maybe it was but I was young and willingly suffered fools. If I had to boil it down, it's lack of trust and inability to treat different employees differently. They create policies for the lowest common denominator, like work from home. If one guy is a slacker, instead of firing his ass, they force everyone else to work in the office because, "well if I let you do it, I have to let everyone else do it." No, grow a sack and fire the slackers; otherwise, that's all you'll have left. All this comes from big corporate managers. Smaller companies are usually better, but not always. If they hire a corporate bozo, they'll quickly go down hill too. M&A ruins a lot of great companies too. What I do to combat it is have 6 months of income or 10 months of expenses saved up (around that) just for this purpose. If a place becomes too annoying, I just leave and take a couple of months off to unwind and write stuff I like to write. If I'm not dealing with a corporate environment, I can get things done 2-5x faster. Corporate America just sucks the soul right out of you.