There are a lot of places like this. If you've never seen office space, it's a great movie about this. And that was before the agilists took over our industry.

There are a lot of places like this. If you've never seen office space, it's a great movie about this. And that was before the agilists took over our industry. They are not to blame for this. But you could say that kind of thing thrives in environments like that. Of course not all places are like this. People self select to the type of jobs best suited to them. People with ambition don't tend to want to be hired in soulless environments that are obviously not getting much done. I kind of work my ass off because I like being engaged in doing something technically challenging. It's a way of life. And since technical skills are in demand, finding places to apply them is not an issue. But there are a lot of people employed in what I would label vanity projects where the whole purpose of the project is to make those that initiated it look good. It's not about the outcome but about being associated with some grand initiative that obviously requires big budgets, a lot of smart looking people, expensive consultants. Big organizations are especially vulnerable to this. Part of the corporate rat race is making yourself look good. And a well proven strategy for that is hoarding a lot of resources for some ambitious sounding project. The bigger the better. The more soul crushing the environment, the bigger the need for the powers that be in such organizations to assert themselves like this. That's why fintech projects are so boring and lucrative at the same time. Lots of money and thus lots of incentive for people to get some of that. Most of those projects are complete and utter bullshit. Very few banks manage to innovate anything and limit their creativity to how they do accounting. Which obviously went terribly wrong for SVB recently. Otherwise it's just team after team going through the moves of reinventing wheels endlessly. And usually quite poorly. Most bank software is kind of awful. Government projects are even worse. And since they are so tedious to deal with, consultancies that deal with them, tend to squeeze hard.