Overly dramatic language aside, what else are engineers that come into a place that isn’t rife with greenfield opportunities expecting?

Most software work out there is babysitting. Oh I know, I know we’re rockstars inside.

In the early days, as the story goes, one person shipped a bunch of features. This part of the anecdote is underdeveloped, IMO. Hazy past recollections formed after emotionally processing a big shift.

Was someone bringing this up before manager and rockstar bailed? Sounds like the team and upper management as a hole lacked foresight, and this is an after the fact realization.

It’s a TEAM effort after all. Poor organization isn’t the fault of one brilliant eng or manager.

> Most software work out there is babysitting.

Yes, of a sort. Green fields are rare, and with the way things are today your picking up a massive pile of pre written infrastructure and libraries that you hardly look at (until they are a problem).

The rockstar mentality is not wrong, but some days you need to pick up the pack and walk up the mountain too.

The problem starts at the interview. We give people coding tests to see if they can produce, but that's less than 10% of the technical side of the job. Really we should be giving code reading tests. What does this do, is there anything wrong with it, is there anything you would change and so on.

Even most "green fields" these days tend to be fields where the grass is torn out, some re-landscaping is done, and some new grass that is a lot like the old grass is planted.