Up to a point this worked, but when I didn't program I started to become part of the problem and when I did, I didn't have time for the management.

The politics are horrendous and just to survive you try to bend just enough with the prevailing wind not to get into trouble but then you find you're becoming "the man" to your team. If you're too nice they start thinking "what does he even do?" - well all the boring stuff that lets them off the hook so they can focus.

Then you realise that problems with arseholes that used to come from above and from the side can now come from below as well and, unless you're in some capitalist fantasyland, there are only slow painful and expensive solutions which damage you.

You also get to see that you're not allowed to do the things that would let your team achieve goals but you are definitely going to be blamed for all the ridiculous ideas your superiors try to force on you when they finally escape through promotion and you're left trying to explain why X and Y were done.

So in general I feel burned out about people after my experience. I completed projects on time in the face of lots of problems which I managed to navigate around effectively but the experience was horrible because people are often horrible and horribleness wasn't some thing you could admire - like "oh they're tough but effective." It was more like stupidity all the way through but made up for by arse kissing.

In every place there's stupidity all over the place. At one place people know all about how to use source control as if that was too unimportant to mention but have no testing system for all their macro-services so everything's always breaking .... but of course we can't delay those new features just because of the latest incident can we? At another I'm getting lectured on how to do everything by the git expert of 3 months while I convert their incredible SCCS system. At another, man,we have 100 commandline arguments and our customers just better learn them all to get an optimal result.

All of them screw up agile and bitch about why it isn't doing what they thought it would.

The new thing is checking up on your AI usage to make sure you're using it enough. Lets not fix our development and testing process ... no ... lets hope AI will magic our quality problems away!

Being a manager doesn't really let you fix this stuff.

Firstly you have to be able to articulate why things are going wrong and that's bloody hard. Then you hit the problem that if you have amazing insight that lets you see what to do, nobody else at that company has it and they're all off following their own ideas no matter how little they might have worked in the past.

Whatever is wrong is that way because the sort of social situation that came into existence formed it that way. You're not battling a lack of insight but something else - perhaps a set of incentives. Whatever it is, it's like trying to stop a hurricane by holding up your hands.

If you're too low the higher management force you to be sht and if you're higher I imagine that the pressures of the business force you down the road of being sht anyhow.

Accountants want software to depreciate - so it has to be "finished." So they hate you going back to fix things that are supposed to be "finished" and want you to work on new things.

..........ok, end of stream of consciousness. :-) I just feel a bit battered by it at the moment. Nothing in life is easy.

Personally I think cars can't be considered an "investment" because they just suck up money.

If you're buying second hand, like it would appear from the price you quoted, then reliability could be the thing that makes the price worthwhile.

I also don't do high mileage but as our petrol car gets older, it's starting to be less reliable. I've had brake issues - EV regenerative braking should ease that problem - and the engine is starting to use more oil. My car has a reputation for gearbox issues from the Uber drivers that I know.

Every time there is some problem my wife gets more freaked out. To avoid total disaster I'm going to have to get something and if it's an EV I just hope that it will give us some years of plain sailing.

Another example: bugs that are not found by testers - whose fault is that - development or test?

Clarity is just another way in which one person or group try to lay blame.

In such scenarios nobody wants to stick their neck out at all, everyone hates everyone else.

At a higher level the usual problem is with incentives being different from one team to another. If you want something done you have to start with the incentives rather than expect people to work against them and there does have to be leadership to break deadlocks.

In America there's pressure to "be a success" and it's not easy to get away from. If you're successful it's a virtue and if you're a "loser" it's because you're lazy or something bad. Bums sleeping on the street don't deserve a place to live even in the richest country in the world because losers need to be punished and winners should not be taxed unfairly.

Where I'm from in Zimbabwe, foreigners including my parents always misunderstood the importance of age - the need to show respect to older people no matter what you think of their utterances. Every 2 seconds I could see other immigrants like myself rubbing Shona people up the wrong way by not understanding where the power lay and what people were proud of.

When I was in Turkey with my wife I realised it was another place where older people held a huge amount of power and the whole country operated differently from Britain - where one only has to be able to get a mortgage to be independent and tell one's parents to go to hell. In Turkey you have to kowtow to your parents and uncles and aunts because you're probably living in a flat that one of them owns until you're quite late in life.

It's not that "success" doesn't matter everywhere but that there are multiple priorities and it's not a pure indication of status. Quite often it's about family or not being of "the other" tribe.

As for thinking you're defined by your job, that is just part of the "pigeon-holing" process by which people try to understand you quickly and sometimes attempt to neutralise a perceived competitor socially. I don't think there's much you can do other than not buy into it yourself and not practise it yourself.

Here one will just get different "nepo babies" who are more directly involved in the struggle for power because they will be connected those in power - people who have been useful and will be wanted in future.

Some people say that the desire for power is the thing that should disqualify a person from having it. i.e. we perhaps need some anti-politicians. This would mean people who don't want to be in power having some forced upon them like in Jury duty.

It's not a simple country - it's a machine with millions of complicated parts and therefore it's difficult to come up with simple things to do that will make everyone happy.

The public don't all have a 10000 foot view, which I don't think any 1 person could comprehensively understand anyhow, and are susceptible to being sold "simple solutions" by politicians - in fact they won't elect anyone who doesn't pretend at least to offer simple solutions.

Design is something put out there which may not stand up to the test of how people actually behave i.e. it may not be stable.

i.e. they're not trying to win the next election.

They're also not there because of the favours they've done existing politicians.

I don't think this is "great" but it does make me wonder if the people who want an end to herditary peers are really going to like what they get.

So of course we feel that something wrong has happened even if it's not easy to put one's finger on it.

I'm glad we can fork things at a point and thumb our noses at those who wish to cash in on other's work.

Once you have your 50k line program that does X are you really going to go in there and deeply review everything? I think you're going to end up taking more and more on trust until the point where you're hostage to the AI.

I think this is what happens to managers of course - becoming hostage to developers - but which is worse? I'm not sure.