Of course there's room for individualism. But if you're going to make the rest of your coworkers lives a misery, you'll find that you'll be expressing your individualism in your own one-person startup.

How is doing something like re-writing a system in your off hours making your co-workers miserable? I mean sure, if you then proceed to bug your boss every day to adopt the new system after he carefully reviewed it and rejected it, I'm with you.

And she lists several "harmful" practices like this.

In short, taking initiative? Nope, we don't like that here in corporate America. Doing what you're told and minimize risk. Don't actually try to make us money or anything.

It's interesting that you feel comfortable extrapolating one person's opinion to represent corporate America.

They're not. Corporate America is pretty risk averse. 90% of any top 500 would freak out about that. Imagine a guy in the legal department rewriting the Eula in his spare time, or the hr director rolling in with a new employee handbook.

Software is a little special, because you can still kinda get away with that.

Eh, Idk if it's that bad in US; if anything the other countries are worse. If you want to scratch that itch find a startup that uses latest and greatest stack.