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Comment by coffeebeqn | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen a few of those. Some are worth their weight in gold. Most are set in their ways from the trauma of trying to make everything not fall apart for so long. Almost all have stagnated and are incapable of bringing in new ideas. Almost all are husks of human beings from putting up and personalizing so much of company dysfunction

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> incapable of bringing in new ideas

But they are REALLY capable of detecting bad ideas.

They always say no, and are always correct.

I mean I’ve literally had people like this fight adding in a version control system.

This reminds me, in a sad way, of a friend of mine who stayed on when a startup we worked at was acquired by a huge corporation. He has an amazing mind for technical detail, and at the startup, he planned and executed some hugely ambitious technical initiatives. But management at MegaCorp treat him as an obstructionist. They want to announce an initiative, launch it, declare it done, make up a big dollar figure for the "savings," and gather a promotion. They don't need the initiative to make sense or work in a technical sense. But he understands the immensely complicated legacy context, all the work required to accomplish anything, and all the things that will break if they leave out parts of the work, and he won't keep his mouth shut. He would love the challenge of running a big ambitious project, but the only way to get anything big approved is to drastically underestimate the effort, so he's stuck rearranging deck chairs until they inevitably eliminate the product and lay him off.

How can we be sure we can trust this "git" thing? Besides, CVS already does everything we need.

The CVS receipts are too long though.

A real life application of Odysseus's Oar. I have mentored junior devs who have "heard" of SVN and also think CVS is just a pharmacy. It was a real gut-punch the first time.

It's hard to walk that line.

There are really good or valid ideas that people try to implement in terrible ways.

things like: for our app on windows, we just ship LIBRARY.DLL with it. We should do the same with linux. (ldd shows 50 inter-dependent libraries)

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