>>>Last year I was asked by a relatively small client to look into a request from a customer, a international company, to collect some data on a web site and forward it to an FTP site.
>>>I was able to find some .NET utilities that did exactly what they needed and put them into use in a few hours.
>
>Right, but the likes of us (and most reading this) increasingly are grey at the temples. The youngsters have different ideas, mostly involving Visual Goldberg and JFirefly. ;-)

Oversimplification.

With larger companies you HAVE to use exchangable maintainance workers and run into the worst situation: you have to combine Peter Principle with Murphy. Also the focus often shifts from things software HAS to accomplish to things that can be built within a budget or even worse, what the budget using a mix of company employed people and freelancers would buy.

I had to adjust my patterns of work a bit this century. In the early days working for large companies was nearly the same as for small companies, at least in so far as often the department acted like a small business, paying for SW out of own budget and balancing price and specs directly.

And we both know there are more such factors ;-)