Having suffered the consequences of a 'mico-manager' on numerous occasions, I'm jumping in here to clarify alittle.

A micro-manager assigns a task to an individual or group of individuals (delegates). The manager then proceeds to tell the delegee exactly how to complete the task - sometimes step by step getting down into the nitty gritty of the task. In my opinion, there is nothing more frustrating, especially in programming. A programmer should be able to take a list of standards or guidelines and adhere to them. He/she doesn't need someone coming along and saying 'I prefer that we do it this way' on almost every block of code when the change does not improve readability, adhere to the standard, or speed up the processing. I have had managers change my code (and in some cases break it) because they preferred it to look another way. It's always fun to go back and fix the 'fix.' I had one manager that loved subroutines to an extradinary level. All programs were coded numerous levels deep. It drove me nuts when I had to trace code. Some procedures only had a couple of lines in them before they called another procedure, etc until I had traced through so many levels I had a list a page long for a simple function.


>>Standards exists for one, and only one, reason. To make the code more readable. Frankly, I don't give a flip what convention is used as long as the code is readable.
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>>Some folks, however, see it as a chance to micro-manage the development process. This practice is, of course, a very bad idea since software development by its nature is a creative endeavor. Creativity and micro-management don't play well with each other.
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>Is "micro-management" the politiclally correct term to mean "poking their noses into everybody's work"?
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>>Next week, I'll take on the task of trying to convince the "PHB" that: 1. Eliminiating the underscore does nothing to increase readability, and, in fact, may make it less readable. 2. That since readability isn't going to be improved, there's no reason to take on the risk of breaking working code.
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>>Frankly, I'll be surprised if I win this argument. I couldn't convince the same individual that Windows stores file time stamps as UTC time with a ton of documentation to back me up.
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>I don't envy you at all :).
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>But then, you don't want to know some constraints under which I have to work...