Looking at the past 10 years of the software industry, I still can't wrap my head around the approach that most large companies have taken to hiring software engineers; treating them as literal cogs in the machine, designing processes which place trust in the hands of middle managers and bureaucrats instead of engineers. There was literally no vetting process for engineers. Now every corner of the internet is full of viruses, spyware and backdoors and of course middle managers had no idea. Nobody is responsible for the software so it belongs to intelligence agencies and hackers.

The software industry turned out so different from how I thought it would. When I decided to pursue it as a career, I thought that software engineers would be treated and given responsibilities like managers.

It's crazy when you think about it; managers are responsible for their people, whom they have limited control over... Yet software engineers have zero responsibility for the software they produce, which they have almost full control over.