Entirely so!

In my 30 years of working I have been a researcher/developer by preference, but I have also managed companies for 20 of those years and continue to do so today. Stupidity knows no bounds and respects nobody. And right now, in this all Perl/MySQL/mod_perl shop I have a guy hired as an HTML coder who insista on performing valiadation using only client-side JS, swears by PHP and won't use templating in any little jobs he gets to code. But he is good at graphics and HTML which I hate loath and detest. At least I know I have subjected my opinons to rigorous analysis and I can give you a clear argument for the decisions I have made.

So I quarantine this guys work. When he works on a project of mine it is purely to generate templates, and he doesn't get to do any of the validation code because I have a module that generates the JS and matches it to the parameters that will be used when the Perl does the same validation server side.

My experience over 30 years is that managers are far too quick to discount the opinions of the engineers/developers and programmers. But they have to learn to argue cogently for their opinion, not just complain. However the ability to communicate, rigorously analyse and argue a case seems to be a dieing skill, not only amongst the managers, but for the programmers etc. as well.

jdtoronto