Fair points, generally, but LoC and deadline arguments still kicking my ass. I'm counting days, not hours, that we are spending on magic issues instead of programming our direct business. No rant, I have an example right before me.

Our CEO, also programmer in distant past, took his macbook, asked me "where do I get Xcode", and in his free time did anything we did in web, including animations, itunes-like header/progress area, etc. With my "intensive kickstart", obviously, but the shocking fact is that he never touched Objective-C, Cocoa, AppKit and HTTP. Never. In. His. Life. (Though he has very strong background of sockets, threads, C, widget frameworks, coreutils, evaluation models and general software engineering). It took about a week or two in between of management and negotiations to simply write that thing by all canons.

I don't think we'll hire another frontend master on the middle of the road anyway, but that has something to do with complexity, not competence.

(Fun thing, he started with Swift but quickly "downgraded" to Objective-C, because Swift was getting in his way too much with no clear benefit.)