This parable is somewhat untrue, as it pats over the "good students engineers" shoulders, while throwing "cowboy programmers" out in the cold. Unless you are p

This parable is somewhat untrue, as it pats over the "good students engineers" shoulders, while throwing "cowboy programmers" out in the cold. Unless you are producing libraries or frameworks, management don't care about internals of software. It's an engineers' problem next time they ask for a modification. Management care about having their problems solved. That's why relations between management and engineers are so notoriously dysfunctional: engineers want to produce art, while management wants to sell stuff to customers. A manager inspecting a code? Really? A manager congratulating with engineers for releasing a half-working software while going off budget? Seriously? Managers hate engineers as much an normal people hate lawyers: they make everything sound way too complicated to squeeze more comfort zone to roam into. Lone cowboy programmers that can conjure working stuff in a minimum time are praised by management, and insulted by colleagues. And, since this parable was probably written by a disgruntled, good scholar engineer, I think this whole story is a little biased...