My first 10 years in the software business, I had great managers. They did the management thing and I did the programming thing and we got great results together.
Then, after the dot-com boom torpedoed industry hiring standards, I got tired of working for managers who should not have been allowed anywhere near a software project, people who were not fit to direct a professional software developer to a table at the Olive Garden, much less direct their activities on a complex project.
I couldn’t possibly have continued to work for people like that — it just made a mockery of all the work I’d done over the years to actually learn something — but I still miss being a developer . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.