I don't know what you've experienced. Maybe you've been unusually lucky. Perhaps I've been unlucky. But everything I've seen convinces me that shitty experiences are the norm in this industry.

I enjoy programming and solving hard problems, but I hate this industry with a passion. I'm sick of the terrible legacy code, the bad decisions made by people dumber than a crocodile's fecal product, and the lack of respect and autonomy for the people doing the actual fucking work.

Even Google turned itself into a closed-allocation shitpile at some point. What a fucking disaster.

We've failed to make ourselves a real profession, and it seems like the norm is for us to suffer dearly for it. Most programmers live in an environment where they have minimal autonomy and don't even choose which projects they work on. It's fucking disgusting and if we had any collective self-respect, we'd demolish the assholes who built these horrible work environments.

Personally, I won't be happy until the people who instituted calibration scores and closed allocation at Google commit seppuku. They destroyed billions of dollars worth of economic value, they ruined the lives of hundreds to thousands of highly talented people, and it's the only decent thing for them to do after that.

In an effort to find out what closed allocation meant I fired up your favourite search engine, Google, and searched the term. I was amused to see an article on your blog come up as the top hit.

I have no problem with the search engine Google. I still use it-- and Gmail, too.

At least 90% of the people at Google are really solid. Good people, great engineers. I have a dislike for the management, not the people or the products.

Interesting, thought provoking posts, but you seem to have used two different tags that pop up in search:

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/tag/project-allocation/ (the Discomfort is Bad piece)

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/tag/closed-allocation/ (the earlier Only Real Option piece)

There's also the more systematic Quora/Forbes piece: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/11/26/what-is-open-al...

> You say things like this a lot. I'm willing to accept that I may be naive, but do you think that those of us who have had primarily positive experiences (and I know a few, not only me) just incredibly lucky?

Do you live in a major tech hub? Because here a lot of the jobs suck and we take the only gigs in town and most of us are the victims of the "two body problem" with more successful spouses anchoring us to undesirable areas.