This memorization and strict adherence to past ways of doing things killed me as a developer. I was tasked with maintaining and customizing an Enterprise Resour

This memorization and strict adherence to past ways of doing things killed me as a developer. I was tasked with maintaining and customizing an Enterprise Resource Planning system. It was a terminal based app. Sometimes system upgrades would add a field to a screen. For example, perhaps country code was added, split from the phone number in the customer screen. I would frequently be requested to suppress the upgrade, or move the new fields so they didn't 'ruin' peoples memorized routines. As the company customized more and more of the code base, upgrades to the system became more and more difficult. Every upgrade required a manual comparison of custom code to be merged with the baseline code. This led to skipped upgrades, and eventually a cessation of upgrades. Of course, after no upgrades over a long period of time it was eventually decided to move to a new ERP system. I am still appalled at the things sacrificed to prevent disruption of a small group of peoples work flow.