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I Am A Developer And I Need To Be Loved!
The dreadful anachronism of power play and automated deference in today’s corporate dystopia needs to end.

After I wrote a recent article (linked below) about how management often trades more on its perceived seniority than its technical prowess, and frequently pushes through arbitrary decisions based upon their own judgement rather than actual evidence or efficiency, I got to thinking, way too much as it happens, about how this insidious power imbalance that has come to pervade the Grand Game of Software Engineering continues to still exist in the modern world.
I reasoned that it’s uncannily similar to what’s commonly known as the “Hi-Vis effect”, about how just donning a Hi-Vis jacket can get you through checkpoints, past security guards, ignored on CCTV, and basically give you access to and therefore over places and things that you really should not have.
Or even, perhaps, similar to the “uniform effect” — where people in general tend to trust others in uniform — anything from traffic wardens, parking supervisors, canteen staff, plumbers, council differs, to…