Yeah. This. In 42 years in IT, i saw way too many situations where the last thing engineers need is a "team" or "management," or even worse, an outside "team leader," which usually resulted in the engineer's work or the team's work turning directly into cowshit. "Managers" want to talk about doing a thing; engineers want to actually do the thing, and both cannot happen simultaneously.

When they see results deteriorating, "managers" think the solution is "more management," which is never, ever the solution.

Didn't Carl Sagan (no stranger to selling books) pretty much stomp von Däniken's "theory" into cornmeal well before the turn of the century?

I searched for it, and did not find, the word "backhoe."

Big fail.

I have said for years, never ascribe to terrorism what can be attributed to some backhoe operator in Ashburn, Virginia.

We got a lotta backhoes in northern Virginia.

I actually used Hot Dog Stand as the inspiration for the color combination on a big internal website years ago. A "committee" was still flapping its gums about the color choice a week before a hard launch, so I simply... decided. A moderately-unpleasant but distinctive combination went into production. I figured that would finally force them to make an actual decision after nine months of meetings. I was wrong. Users seemed to like it OK, nobody complained, so it stayed.

For almost five years.

I actually finally TOLD them, "you never actually decided, so I picked the colors to be deliberately a little obnoxious so you would actually get off the pot and decide."

They were PISSED.

Not long after, I came up with a way for users (not committees of the managers of users, who usually know nothing) to choose their own preferred colors, and over 80% of them never used that feature and left the garish original I had pulled out of my butt in 1999, because now they were used to it.

What else is there to do in Dayton?

No.

I like making young bros' heads spin by explaining how little intrinsic value gold actually has.

They all start out with "if the shit comes down, gold will --" and I cut them off by saying "-- still have almost zero intrinsic value."

Can't eat it. Can't burn it. Can't really make shelter or a weapon out of it. Useful for tiny microcircuits, but that's not something the preppers will be doing in Montanam

"Well, it'll always be valuable, because people think --"

Aha, dudebro, now you're in the realm of "perceieved value." Whole different game in the end times...