"Everyone has interests- why do they want to believe what they believe?" One of the most common mistakes most people make when they're evaluating someone else'

"Everyone has interests- why do they want to believe what they believe?" One of the most common mistakes most people make when they're evaluating someone else's actions is to refuse to give them the benefit of the doubt and to overly assign negative drivers. Assuming that managers are power hungry and desperate to be in control is the equivalent of assuming that the only reason a programmer would select a particular technology is that it would look good on their resume. Both of those can be true, but far more commonly they're not. Neither managers nor programmers are generally stupid and they're not generally malicious. Most managers aren't even power hungry. Like most people they want to do a decent job they can be proud of, be surrounded by decent, contented people and customers, and be reasonably rewarded for what they do. If you assume any of these things to be false you're going to be wrong considerably more often that you're right. What is also common between programmers and managers is that they are constrained by a range of factors and often have very limited control over the constraints placed upon them. Managers have managers. They're answerable to directors, to customers, to shareholders and to suppliers. As a rule the larger the organisation the more complex the web of constraints and constrainers becomes (hence why large organisations tend to react so slowly). The thing to understand is what these constraints are. They're rarely technical, they're far more commonly budgetary or time based. When your boss says no he almost certainly isn't saying "no, it's a bad idea, I know better", he's saying "no, I can't do this without damaging / risking something else". So work out what the limiting factors are and try and work with him within those. Often that will mean taking a longer term view - getting something changed within a period of weeks or months is often massively more difficult than if you set yourself a longer time frame. Short term commitments (deliveries, revenue over the next couple of months) are often close to immovable, things over a longer time scale are often more flexible. One of the things bosses are often bad at is talking about the business to programmers. Partly this is because programmers aren't always interested, but a lot of it is habit. If everyone knows what the targets, deadlines and schedules are, then they're in a better position to work within them.