This is an important point, which I didn't bring out in my diatribe. I'm a mechanical engineer working as a dev/op. I understand what my engineering-department

This is an important point, which I didn't bring out in my diatribe. I'm a mechanical engineer working as a dev/op. I understand what my engineering-department coworkers are trying to do, and have a good feeling for what it would take from software to help get that done. I'm embedded in the business, talking with people. I don't have a B-school background, and sit around talking to managers, to write requirements docs to chuck over a wall. I see what needs to be done, and do it. Perfect example: When I got put out to pasture (in my story), I was working on rewriting an old, slow application that was used by just a couple dozen people. In about 3 months, I was about 80% done, and got around to asking the really important questions. The program was slow because it was basically doing a pivot operation on an entire database. I took the 800-line query in their existing Java application, rewrote it in 40 lines, and doubled the speed, but why? Turns out that there were just 2 other people in the company that used the output, and I knew one of them, and I knew he didn't need 90% of that data. So we were just getting to the point where -- like you said -- maybe a weekly email of just the relevant data was really all that was needed for the output -- when my boss politically maneuvered to kill the project. So now these users will deal with this horrible mess until the heat-death of the universe.