I believe you. No doubt that this also happens. But I have also experienced developers pushing for simplifications (think customer service UI, extremely convoluted process for testing corrections, etc.) being put into their place, leaving no doubt that they were seen as "troublemakers".
So I just wanted to point out that aspect. Of course, things like that are showing a significant degree of organizational dysfunction, but that is big corp today.
I don't believe we're in disagrement. Yes, there's bad management which will resist all attempts to improve things. Quit, move on. You won't fix the place.
I'm specifically pushing against the stance of
> That's the job of management, that's why they get rewarded for that, and I have a feeling we have a lot of bad management.
It's just not. And with that stance, you won't get things moving forward because it displays a major disregard for other peoples motivations, priorities and constraints. It displays the assumption that technical solutions can be judged on purely technical merits while real-world tradeoffs are so much more complex. If you want to be able to move things forward, you need to work with the organizational structure, not shunt off work to them.
