> I feel like I have to jump so many hoops and spend so much mental bandwidth just to get the permission to code. This comment speaks to me very deeply. It is

> I feel like I have to jump so many hoops and spend so much mental bandwidth just to get the permission to code. This comment speaks to me very deeply. It isn't like this where I work now, but I've worked a couple of larger enterprises that were exactly like this. Everything was set up to prevent developers from sitting down and coding. I haven't worked enough different places to know if there's a clear pattern here, but in neither of these companies was tech their core business. One was an tech-based offshoot of a financial services company, and the other was a very large retailer. Not everywhere I've worked where tech isn't core business has been like this, so that's why I hesitate to draw a general pattern. However, I've worked at four different software/tech companies over the years and, whilst they all had their flaws, in none of them did I ever feel like I had to get permission to code. Actually, that's not quite true: I did work at one for a number of years where latterly it did start to feel like that, and it was one of many reasons I left. But it definitely wasn't the norm for the majority of the time I was there.