My leadership is constantly pushing for “hedgehog” style advice to be depersonalized, encoded in policies, and handed over to bureaucrats or automation to enforce.

Trying to empathize with their position, I think they think failure happens because the right hedgehogs didn’t show up to the design review that day, or forgot to harp on whatever point that time. They are never satisfied with the “it depends, there’s no hard and fast rule, you have to let the experts think about it in context” responses I give them when pressed for policy. This is limiting my advancement. But worse, someday someone will join the team and will write those hedgehog policies, and then I’ll have to live under them too.

Software engineering is a thinking person’s game. I get that management wishes it weren’t, but it is.