>>But most of the stuff the guys complain about aren't about programmers' incompetence, it's the economics of it. The guys holding the purse strings never understood what they are dealing with, and made all sorts of wrong decisions.
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>I've heard that often, but in my experience lousy programmers will made lousy software, no matter what they're told to do.
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>Theoretically dumb management can tell good developers to do dumb things, but the good developers I've worked with have refused to do dumb things and went somewhere where they could do smart things.


I always felt it was my duty to let my employer know if there might be a better way to accomplish what they wanted done but I never felt it was my job to make their decisions for them. After all it is their money and they have the right to be, in my opinion, wrong or dumb - and live with the consequences. BTW I also kept copious records of my recommendations. Now that I have been "retired" for 5 years maybe it is time to discard the boxes of memos and directives I accumulated over 30 years not to mention deleting 1000's of emails some over 20 years old,