A good manager is not a multiplier but a subtractor. They subtract the inanities and insanities of flawed organisations - they allow use of more appropriate te

A good manager is not a multiplier but a subtractor. They subtract the inanities and insanities of flawed organisations - they allow use of more appropriate tech, or they encourage developers to take on projects that might otherwise be frowned upon. But they have limits - at each level up the hierarchy there are always decisions above your pay grade. And that is the fundamental problem - organisations have built in limiters to how much change they can accept internally - because too much internal change breaks the cash generator. So sometimes the most performant thing to do is not to chnage anything, or perhaps just to leave. As I progress, I realise that coding is at the bottom of an inverted pyramid of "affect" - decisions in your code has less business impact than business decisions. For example I was just moaning that audible/kindle sync positions so you can read a bit, listen a bit. But a business decision was taken to kill off that fairly neat bit of coding - the business decision was not in sync with the coding decisions. To my mind that means we should have smaller coder driven organisations- see programmer anarchy, not somehow work out how to hire more managers