What Shape Are You?
My rite of passage as a senior developer included starting to ask myself the question: does activity X <i>really</i> move the project forward?<p>But there's another side to this, of which management is often not made aware of: in longer projects people tend to accumulate, for lack of a better word, "rituals" - stuff that's done manually, even though it should've been automated or dropped.<p>These are insidious, because they slow down work, introduce inconsistencies (sometimes even errors), but are largely ignored.<p>And for some reason the arrogant, disobedient, oddly-shaped person is the only one noticing it.<p>From almost every place I worked at I only stay in touch with one person - that person.