>>Now imagine coding a payroll :). In every software company, you'd get one guy who'd simply be written off. He'd code the payroll, know everything about it, won't ever get to do anything else, and won't ever be in a danger of losing a job... it's a job nobody wants. Every 4-5 months there's something new, and you have to apply it to (and over) any craplegacy data that some customers with special cases may have.
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>Thanks - an interesting explanation of how things worked. I was in Moldova for the best part of a year (can't remember which year - but it was well before the 'cold war' ended - maybe mid '80s). I think the same type of systems were operating there but language barriers meant that I could never grasp the more subtle aspects. Just a lot of work and business practices that never made much sense to me at the time.

At the time I figure Moldova was in the USSR - in which case you can forget all of this and replace the mindset with state-controlled, where nobody really wants to think, or act on his own, because the last guy who had his own thoughts was still guarding the factory's back yard in the night shift. The command economy was very different from the self-managed market economy. I've seen some leftovers of this in Hungary in the mid-90s, when they had just elected their second coalition government. I'd catch even small entrepreneurs still doing nothing in some situations, waiting for orders from Budapest. There's a legendary story about one of the Yugos who opened a small business there, and got a package in the mail, went to pick it up, and the postal clerk asked to see an authorization. The guy spent good ten minutes proving that he owns the company, he is the company, that the whole company is present, along with the official stamp and some basic documentation (which happened to be in his bag). No, you need an authorization. So the guy blew a valve (in Serbian: his film broke), took a sheet of paper and wrote, as a CEO, an authorization to himself, as an employee, to pick mail for the company. That worked, he got his package.