I don't think you are wrong and that's the actual cause of the problems, not the tools. But that's for another day..

I think the use of ORMs by people who understand databases is fine. I think when ORMs turn into, “you don’t need to know SQL!” Is when things go off the rails.

Everyone (management) wants a way to get productivity without loads of experience and tools that promise that tend to be misleading.

Are there really software jobs where managers are the ones making decisions like whether or not to use ORMs? Some of these comments make me feel like I've had a truly blessed career.

You better believe you have had a truly blessed career.

In most places the moment you say "this will take 67 minutes and not the 65 minutes you thought it would", all sorts of idiots that know nothing about programming will come and dispute your every technical decision.

Exaggeration of course, but not far from the truth. Worst of all are the CTOs that already sing only the CEO's tune, come and review your entire project in exhaustive detail, conclude that you did 99% of everything correctly and well and exactly how they would do it, then proceed to fire you over the missing 1%.

Again, kind of an exaggeration, but again, not far from the truth either.

In most places people are treated like interchangeable cogs. Better hold tight to your warm positions, it's not a given you'll find a better one if you figure that you must leave.

I dream of a workplace where after I prove my worth -- 1-2 months -- I'll just be left alone to produce and correct code and protect the company's interests without being second-guessed, even though I am one of the most productive devs there. I dream of that. I might cry if one day I realize that I've actually landed such a job.

And I am a senior. 21 years in the profession. Food for thought for you.

It's all about who you know and drink coffee with, apparently. Your abilities as a professional barely matter, it seems.

I’ve only worked in a few large companies where nobody even cared about code quality unless you brought down a production system with a bad change or something.

You’re seriously saying you’ve had 21 years of constantly being second guessed? What kinds of places are you working at?

I've been a contractor in the last 7 years and I've come to dearly regret it.

Never has my work been so second-guessed and ripped apart. I suppose my price was too high for them, not sure.

I'm still reflecting and have no good conclusions to offer.

(But part of the time I was in bad health and my work quality suffered. So that explains one percentage of the cases at least.)

I've been doing this 15 years and I've been dealing with second guessing or managers acting like we don't know what we are doing the whole time. The problem being the managers are MBAs who know little or next to nothing about software development. They don't like being told differently from whatever narrative they come up with and primarily solely focus on cost.

The company I work for considers themself a MSP. The parent company is a sales company selling non software products.

In any case, yeah it happens.

It’s usually indirect, “only use libraries from these approved internal systems”, “new projects use these templates”… etc. Eventually to go against this set of standards make you appear to be a squeaky wheel while everyone else seems to be working just fine.

Right but in those cases were these libraries selected by engineering managers and not developers? I definitely appreciate being stuck in a pattern but everywhere I've worked the standards were at least set by technical contributors (competent or not).

At a tech-focused business, probably, but think about all the programming jobs and IT departments that ultimately roll up to very non-technical people. Often what happens is a vendor becomes the chosen vendor for some expensive tool (think Microsoft, Red Hat/IBM, Oracle, whatever), and they have a solution for almost everything (theoretically). You start having to justify why you want to use a different thing to people who don't care.

Say you have 200 windows servers, and someone wants to use linux, "Why, what are you trying to solve?" Sometimes the industry forces the issue (think marketing people using Macs), but generally people are trying to streamline things they don't care about. "Use the tools that come in this box we buy from this vendor who we pay all our bills too, everything else is a weird liability I have to worry about hiring for and keeping track of."

The end result tends to be pretty mediocre though.