I think that the implication that people may presume in my critique above is that I think the problem is the developers not being better, but that's perception is a big part of the profit motive that I'm critiquing. If success is a zero sum game then sure, you want only the best, but what I'm critiquing is that it is that very same zero sum game which makes it harder for these corporate developers to get ahead. I'm not charging some evil master plan, just that it's not realistic to presume that all developers must be top of their game at any one point in their career, or even that it must be their primary motivation in life.

I don't think the problems these developers face are only related to contemporary society seeing the corporate profit motive prerogative as paramount. It's also the attitudes of other developers who look down on them and put them down and actively detract from the reputation of those "corporate drones" who aren't as good as them. How about maybe didn't have the same opportunities? How about didn't get the same influences in school? How about just not having any mentors to show them the ropes? I find myself mentoring a lot and yet I also find it important to not be patronizing, but that's not very hard when I appreciate and am thankful to be working with these developers because they have so many good qualities, even if they haven't yet learned some abstract coding concepts and maybe aren't even interested in learning them.

But bleeding heart for the poor drones is not even the point, that's patronizing in itself. I think the self-described non-drone developers that look at things this way who are as negatively affected by the perception problems. On a delusionary scale of one to ten who's the more delusional one? The true believer in the way things work right now and is hoping for their big Startup break so that they too will be winners and free? Or the corporate drone developer who's a survivor, who's often an immigrant or foreign worker, who's sending remittances home every year, or who's already lost all hope and for whom thinking about career is about the time they reach for the depression meds.

It's also worth considering that the negative weight that is assigned to these developers is just plain factually wrong. First of all the corporations that hire them are making buttloads of money upon the work of these "unskilled" developers. And anyway, what exactly should we do with this supposedly dead weight? Throw them out of the village? Banishment? Their lives aren't worth as much? There isn't a place for them at the success in life table like there is for the better developers? Is it that they don't work as hard? Really? Hmmm...and what is this work of which you speak, bank software? Health insurance statement producing doofangles that too 65 hours a week for the past two months because the integration with the COBOL backend was acting up again and the nightly batch jobs from partner corps sent to the FTP dropbox were frequently corrupted? Hmmm.

And then some smartass comes along and tells them they're stupid for using FTP or some other random criticism, some developer always has a better way to do it of course, but fails to realize that the developer they are talking about simply has no say, no time to research, and nobody pointing to sources of information that will make it easier. Not everyone reads HN.

I think the problem may not be those less skilled developers, the problem is social conditioning and the narrative of what success is being all wrong.

We might talk a good game about looking for happiness in all the right places but that seems to break down pretty damn quick the moment we start critiquing those drones for not being good enough workers for the greater good. So what is is? Socialist or Capitalist? Or is the Left and Right narrative that guides our intellectual, political, and populist debate simply completely broken to begin with. But I think that broken narrative are what guides the conversation and attitudes as they relate to the concept of better or worse developers and how they contribute to us, presumably the great ones that is.

So my actual criticism is really about the attitudes, both those "greater good" attitudes, and those profit motive constraints which remove so much of the joy in a job well done. "More bricks, less hay" seems to be all we hear in corporate-land. Or at least, that's all I hear, maybe your bigcorp is a healthier society.

I agree with you, and in particular this. My experience in craporate IT is exactly that. I've had a number of projects where we had a very specific set of operational requirements (platform, OS, database, web server), and couldn't get even a hint about anything vaguely resembling a functional requirement. I've even had "emergency" projects where it was suddenly critical that we deliver right away! But the same people complaining that we were late couldn't tell us what the software was supposed to do.

One company I worked for didn't tell the development team about some software we were supposed to develop (as it turned out, this software was supposed to be part of the company's flagship product, but no one knew what it was or what it was supposed to do) six months AFTER it was supposed to have been shipped.

There's really no way any developer could ever actually add value to a place like that, no matter how skilled and how motivated.

Those projects they canceled, and the craptacular ones that somehow managed to make it into production, maybe for 30 years, those are the decisions that are making a lot of money. The idealized view of the peace and love and beautiful code making money are just not how it's done in the real world. I'm not a Microsoft hater, but hey, there's a good example for all you haters out there.