There's an incredible amount of ignorance of what has been done before and why things are the way they are, that I encounter continually

When agile-ish processes use up on of those lives every day, that leaves very little slack before recurring customer statusing, actual troubleshooting, or an honest-to-god productive planning meeting wipes the counter out.

I suspect you could waste a lot less time if meetings required agendas distributed beforehand and minutes distributed afterwards, but absolutely no one does that, or would read such material if it was produced.

At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.

Mostly I've gotten burned out because I couldn't bring myself to care and because I was bored.

Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.

There's this very odd strain of infantilization that runs through a lot of corporate office management, like they are trying to reward second-graders with a choice from the prize box if they collect enough gold stars, rather than dealing with fully-grown adults that have their own children.

Also there's a strong risk of doing some little employee-appreciation gesture that backfires and pisses people off. Most of them do, because it feels like the company has cheaped out, or worse, spent a shit-load of money on something that you hate and then expects you to be grateful about it.

This leaves the completely inscrutable and mostly undocumented REST apis that I've got to trial-and-error at, and always ask whether I did something wrong, the other party made a breaking change, or its just a Tuesday and the infrastructure is derped up.

The median level of skill and conscientiousness (particularly) is just so low.

Throwing more lower-skilled people at a project just makes it move slower and reduces quality.

I could have dunked easily, instead of just that one golden time I jumped freakishly high.

I do hope that we can get back to that "JS as compilation target" model eventually with WebAssembly. Even with improvements like TypeScript slathered on top, it's not fun writing Javascript, the tooling sucks, and it's vastly less productive than better developer ecosystems.