They write code to implement the all-important features. They write code to work around lack of process. They write code to work around problem people not doing their jobs well. They write code to work around buggy code by other developers. They write code to work around their own code, written weeks or months earlier.
I've been encouraging them to _reduce_ the amount of code they write, and instead consider the context around why they're writing the code. Code is just one way - and not always a particularly good way - that we can solve people and process problems.
Basically Surgery is a means to an end (patient gets better) and a useful tool for achieving that but it's also dangerous so only used when necessary. If other treatments can fix the problem you try them first. If surgery is required you only do the minimum required to treat the issue.
Code is similar. More code means more maintenance, more tech debt, slower deliverables in future and higher risk of dependencies no one understands. So when coding ask "Can I fix this without code?" because if yes it's often easier in the long run and "What's the bare minimum/simplest code I need to write to fix the issue?".
It seems like the talk was at CraftCon 15 and called "Beyond Features: rethinking agile software delivery with Dan North".
I couldn't find it, but I found a similar talk he gave at a meetup that discussed surgery: https://youtu.be/EoJFWdhv8q0?feature=shared&t=1564 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz5HBtDl-1A
The big problem in many companies is that often programmers are kept out of that context. Problems are discussed without programmers, and only tossed to programmers once non-programmers have decided what they need to do. I think we need to be more involved in those decisions.
I hate seeing people who would rather be doing customer interaction half heartedly refuctoring while people who live and breathe code sit on customer calls bored out of their minds.
I also feel a little disgusted at seeing talent wantonly squandered unnecessarily.
A couple of years ago, I was freelancing for a company where I wrote a lot of excellent code. They had a bunch of data they wanted to do something with, but weren't entirely sure what or how, so I did that for them. Connected, visualized it, made it fast, and they loved it. And so did I. It was fun work, I talked to a lot of people about what they wanted and needed, and delivered that.
My freelance period ended, but I wasn't ready to leave this project yet, so I became an employee, but that turned out to be a massive step back in terms of income. Despite the fact that I worked closely with lots of stakeholders and solved complex problems for them, their internal rules didn't allow them to pay me as more than a code monkey. I felt all the non-code work I did wasn't being appreciated. Nor the code work.
I left, they ruined the application (it's apparently slow as molasses now), and now I'm about to go back. I guess I've made peace with the fact that they don't pay programmers as much as I think they should. (It's not actually bad pay, just not as much as non-programmers get.) But mostly, it was a fun project that taught me a lot, and I want more of that.
We could combat that tendency by taking a longer time than necessary on some tasks, basically loafing to make our work look harder, but who wants to play that game?
Surely there was a negotiation step before signing contracts? What happened there? What was the blocker that did not "allow" them to change their own internal rules that they themselves control? Surely there is a way to do that.
>I left, they ruined the application (it's apparently slow as molasses now), and now I'm about to go back
Then state what you want before going back, if it's important for them they will find a way. Don't accept these kinds of zero effort "oh our policy doesn't allow us to pay you more" explanations.
> and do not even have a possibility to grow to management.
Engineers shouldn’t be _forced_ into management but the option should be encouraged if they have the aptitude for it.
My point is literally at the arbitrariness of promotion and how biased it is. There's a very clear bias that being structured by business people who think business people are the most important. The classic "I do x, so x is more important" fallacy.
My point is to make people just question if what we do is actually reasonable, and if we could do things better.
Besides, I've worked with people who previously knew how to program but lost the skill when moving to management for a decade and they aren't really any better than the manager that never knew it. Neither of these results in smooth operation. But I think to see a solution we'd also need to reconsider the premise. That's what I'm getting at.
I do not say that experts have to be put in charge of people instead of doing what they're doing.
I rather say that experts should be in charge of what they are doing.
This is exactly why we can't innovate in Europe.
The next step of my career progression at my current company is deciding whether I want to go into the continuing tech route as an architect or staff software engineer or if I want to go into the managerial / people leader route.
The later is quite more lucrative, but I would have to stop programming.
Also managing a team of even 10 developers was the easiest job I ever had. Hire well, treat them well, talk with them routinely, solve conflicts, allow them to explore things.
The hard part of the job is of course functioning as a therapist for disorganised power-grabbing product people and shielding my team from their shenanigans. I'm so tired of it.
Every bad engineering manager I had two characteristics: they never have time to code but also never have to talk to me or any other employee.
France rebuilt its educational system under Napoléon to teach science to bright kids from all backgrounds.
Fast-forward 200 years, it degraded into a system that teaches anachronistic humanities to smart and docile kids of upper middle classes.
P.S. For non-French, I am talking about the system of Grandes écoles [1]
Of course I can't speak for every country but that's the reality.
I'm not saying that anywhere else is better, but in other places I worked there was no such illusion.
arguably the most important part. :) 2nd being team and company culture imo.
Never do it on employment contract in Europe. Even if you really are and then quit your job, from next Monday everything will operate as if you never had worked there.
> you're never going to make the same as people who push numbers, papers and money.
That's why the top EU companies are loathed ERP company, perfumes and purses company, and obesity drug for Americans company.
The best web dev isn't the one that knows .Net, React, Svelte, GraphQL, micro-frontends, etc. The best web dev is the one that can convince their manager that their business objectives can be achieved by using WordPress.
I look forward to the day that software 'engineers' are held accountable to the same degree that all other engineers are.
I've written software for industrial machinery that can kill people if it went wrong. It's amazing how much your views on software change when you realize that your accountability starts at manslaughter and goes up from there.
A human life is valued at around $10m in the developed world, incidentally my first real job was fixing an excel spreadsheet that caused $10m in trade losses after the API it called for exchange rates went stale.
I'm not saying that we arrest everyone who writes a spreadsheet to help them with their job. But _someone_ should have their head on the line when it becomes a business process without oversight that can cause millions in losses, damages or bills.
When working as an electrical engineer I never had co-workers fighting me on whether I should do stuff that goes against building code. My building engineering friends never had a product manager say "trust me, we don't need this load bearing wall".
I know of engineers who did stupid shit at work and got their license revoked, and even some famous ones went to jail.
Of course there is the famous Steve Jobs story [1] where he forced Burrell Smith to do a stupid PCB and it didn't work, but Jobs was at least willing to accept that this was a test and would take the fall for the spent money.
I like the Practical Engineering YT channel and one thing I always find interesting is learning about all the research and guidance that exists for things I never thought of. Like there are 400 page documents on how to implement drainage in dams based on decades of experience and post-mortem investigations when things went wrong.
But it feels like every time I'm involved in a software project, we're starting almost from scratch and just incrementing towards an unknown future which is "good enough". Even if you have a team of experienced developers then the Best Practices at the start of the project are not what they were 2 years prior. The tools that they used on their past projects have evolved (or been deprecated). Or maybe they're being asked to do a bunch of data engineering where they previously did full stack Web development, because org structures are fluid and many IT leaders feel that good engineers can solve any problem with code (ignoring the idea of specialisation).
This is not to disagree with your point, but more to say that a lot of the infrastructure and professional norms around classical engineering disciplines just aren't there (yet) for developers.
I honestly doubt it will ever get there. Our profession pretty much materialized over night in comparison to other disciplines, and in a rapidly evolving environment, with a much broader application. Only so many bridges/dams/buildings are built in a given time frame and have such incredible capital costs, and human life costs if they get it wrong. It makes sense to carefully curate who and how those things get built. The vast majority of software on the other hand, unless it is for medical/construction/factory equipment that can kill people, is usually super low stakes. And with the democratization of programming in general, even your VBA-curious business analyst can do it in their spreadsheet. Sure I can do the pro se thing in court (and lose my life/freedom), read webmd and treat my own cancer (and die), build my own dam (and flood my neighborhood), but we gatekeep those professions because of the dire consequences of fucking it up. Until software more broadly has those kinds of consequences, there will be no licensure.
You don't need to write pacemaker firmware to produce severely negative outcomes through ineptitude or indifference. I know of a frontend developer whose UX mistake in a financial mobile app triggered a vulnerable customer to end their life. I've heard stories of people ending up in the hospital because of unmet, unvoiced requirements for tasks delegated to junior developers.
It's a strange world we live in where the "profession" with the most (usually unrealized) potential has no oversight.
Bob Martin said it best: We either regulate ourselves or we will find ourselves regulated.
I get the point you're trying to make but you absolutely can't store chlorine gas safely in your garage in a coke bottle. If you try doing this as a business, you'll get shut down hard and possibly some prison time too.
On the other hand, WordPress is a valid solution for a huge number of businesses. Perhaps the previous commentor should have labored their point and noted that the engineer's skill is required to know when WordPress is a valid option, and also just as importantly, when it's not.
But suggesting the use of WordPress is in no way comparable to doing something illegal like storing chlorine gas improperly.
A better comparison would be to using an off the shelf chlorine storage system versus developing your own. For most companies, off the shelf will be the right choice, but others are doing complex things that require them to develop their own systems.
I suspect that a big reason CS is not held to the same standards is due to abstraction and that it is still new. But we do live in a time where bad code can get people killed (control systems are the easiest examples), just as building a faulty bridge will. I just hope we don't need a Tacoma Bridge to cause change. Obviously it is harder to figure out things that are more abstract like Social Media (can provide both good and harm).
But I'd say, you can always say no. If you're not saying "no" now, that's still a choice you've made. A job is very persuasive, and I'm not saying you're bad for just keeping your head down, just that people should consider where they'd draw the line. The line is personal and different for everyone (which is okay!). Having taken traditional engineering courses, I'll note that ethics is frequently discussed and you're likely to be told you should try to define your line before you asked to cross it. If you don't, you'll likely to cross the line without knowing, as you just didn't know what it looked like. You can always redefine the line as you get more resolution (it continuously updates) but it's much harder to say "no" when you haven't given it much thought.
If an engineer tried to build a skyscraper or a bridge, they'd meet challenges other than them having knowledge or professional certification.
And to your point, if anyone ever asked an engineer to insert another floor between 8th and 9th floor of a 15 story building, they'd laugh at them. In software engineering, this is possible even if hard.
And finally, because of software living a much different life, it will be hard to define criteria for good software.
Bingo.
For building engineers this is chuckle worthy. For software engineers, it's Wednesday.
Ah yes, another cocktail party idea [1] where a software engineer pretends like they understand civil engineering.
As Dan notes himself, even scenarios which are simpler than this (moving a bridge, moving a building) are done much more rarely compared to similar requests in software. I did not accidentally use "modify something in a dimension that's really hard to modify in civil engineering" as an example — perhaps your response was a cocktail party response of someone not understanding either civil or software engineering?
IMHO, it is all about costs (which I start off with being small in software — comparatively): traditional engineering doing changes like these is extremely expensive and thus they don't (it's usually cheaper to demolish and rebuild).
Or skip to this part of Hillel's video[0]
I've been an aerospace engineer. Worked there before coming over to CS. And I can certainty tell you that yes, someone may ask you to split a floor in half. There's nothing really preventing you from doing this. There's buildings with more levels than there are ordered floors. It's a 15 floor building, but you label your floors 1-14. Such an area can be used for things like running conduit or even just as a fire break. Hell, there are even split level homes, you know those ones where you walk in the front door and either go up or down? There's also things like scissor flats.
So yeah, you are making the mistake because your example belies you. It illustrates that you aren't aware of the complexities and abstractions in the engineering job. It's okay to have only a rudimentary understanding of engineering, you've spent your time learning other things that are more valuable to you. But that doesn't mean you should assume things are simpler than they are.
The truth is that any job, has depth and far more complexity than appears at the surface. While in many jobs you can get away with only doing the simple part, there's still more depth than is actually being utilized. Likely for the same common error. You are right about cost being a big factor, but this is also a very different argument than the one about floor 8 and a half.
> someone may ask you to split a floor in half
Yes, I've seen it done plenty times. It's especially common with old houses which might have 4-5m high ceilings around here and people do introduce new floors in between.
Similarly, with pillars being carrying structures, it is feasible to go and turn 3 floors which are 4m high each into 4 floors ~3m high.
But while that's a way to interpret my "original ask" (and all of your examples like hidden floors and such), my intent was clear — in software, you literally go and introduce a whole new thing between the two things that were tighly coupled. Like actual structures above a certain floor.
If your implication was followed in software (i.e. try to predict the future and introduce hidden floors, service floors and such) — and it sometimes is — we really end up with worse, more complex software that has technical debt built in from the start. IOW, that's exactly not the way to build software.
Again, this does not discount the complexity of civil engineering — it is freaking hard! But my point is that it is DIFFERENT and that same approaches do not necessarily work.
> and I have experience with construction as well.
> If your implication was followed in software (i.e. try to predict the future and introduce hidden floors, service floors and such) — and it sometimes is — we really end up with worse, more complex software that has technical debt built in from the start.
Hillel discusses this right here[1] (this also addresses your last line)
>> The idea that software is inheriently unpredictable and you're always doing completely new things all the time. While engineering is basically doing the same thing over and over again. Umm... yeah... so... this is probably the only question I got where people would start laughing at me when I asked it.
>> And, of course, only someone who hasn't done serious engineering work in the physical world could say something like "The predictability of a true engineer’s world is an enviable thing. But ours is a world always in flux, where the laws of physics change weekly", thinking that the (relative) fixity of physical laws means that physical work is predictable. When I worked as a hardware engineer, a large fraction of the effort and complexity of my projects went into dealing with physical uncertainty and civil engineering is no different (if anything, the tools civil engineers have to deal with physical uncertainty on large scale projects are much worse, resulting in a larger degree of uncertainty and a reduced ability to prevent delays due to uncertainty).
In fact, let me quote from a footnote of Dan's. #2
>> When I listen to cocktail party discussions of why a construction project took so long and compare it to what civil engineers tell me caused the delay, the cocktail party discussion almost always exclusively discusses reasons that civil engineers tell me are incorrect. There are many reasons for delays and "unexpected geotechnical conditions" are a common one. ***Civil engineers are in a bind here since drilling cores is time consuming and expensive and people get mad when they see that the ground is dug up and no "real work" is happening (and likewise when preload is applied — "why aren't they working on the highway?"), which creates pressure on politicians which indirectly results in timelines that don't allow sufficient time to understand geotechnical conditions. This sometimes results in a geotechnical surprise during a project (typically phrased as "unforseen geotechnical conditions" in technical reports), which can result in major parts of a project having to switch to slower and more expensive techniques or, even worse, can necessitate a part of a project being redone, resulting in cost and schedule overruns.***
> my point is that it is DIFFERENT and that same approaches do not necessarily work.
[0] I must stress that I'm not trying to say one is more important or better, just that they are different.
The judgement isn't made on if mistakes happen, but if those that built the thing should have known better. You don't get sued when you legitimately don't know, but you can't be infinitely stupid either. It's about if you should have known. This does include things like not spending enough time or research determining if something is safe, because you can't just avoid answering a question that a reasonable person would have asked. And it has to lead to harm being done.
It can help to see what the lawsuits are about. Like Takoma Airbags case[0] where they're being charged with knowing issues. It's for knowingly doing something bad. But you can't avoid asking questions, like in the Challenger Shuttle disaster[1] both NASA and Thiokol ignored signs that the O-rings being used were potentially dangerous and ignored concerns from engineers. While they didn't know the O-rings were defective in cold weather they should have known.
With more abstract stuff like Social Media, yeah, we're not in clear cases that are doing harm. No one is going to be prosecuted for inventing nor even building social media. But you can have knowingly harmful practices like manipulating users feeds without consent to perform testing to see if you can make users more happy or sad[2]. The issue isn't that the experiment happened, but that you're experimenting on humans who did not knowingly give consent. You couldn't do that type of a thing with people offline. Offline you need consent before experiments. And you can't just say they'll subject to any experimentation with no warning and grant this privilege indefinitely. Because you should be asking if your experiments might harm people and there's a reasonable belief that it might cause harm.
And on the other hand, no one is asking that the devs at wikipedia be sued or lose their programming license just because they created a dark mode where the radio button has an option of "system" but is defaulted to "light". Nor because they didn't go to the lengths is would be to make sure all images properly render when viewed in dark mode. These don't cause harm. Annoying and easy to fix issues, but no real harm has been done. Just petty issues.
It can definitely be fuzzy at certain points, especially as all this is new, but it is also okay that things become more defined over time as we learn more. The point is to keep ethics in mind and to be thinking of the consequences of your work. No one is in trouble if you don't hurt someone but you can't walk around never considering the consequences of your actions. It's the work version of not allowing an excuse of "I was just following orders" or "I was just delivering them, I didn't know what was in them". This is not some belief that people should be sued just because they wrote shitty code. But they could IF someone gets hurt AND you used AI to write code because it is cheaper than a person AND knew that the code being written could harm someone.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-vns/case/united-st...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/29/ethics-in-a-data-driven-wo...
Worked at a SaaS company that had a fantastic product and a great tech team that had built it.
We also did a lot of data-based research and published it as white papers for lead gen.
We wanted to start publishing more content on our site to expand reach, so the team decided a CMS would be a solution for the researchers and content marketers to publish without any tech involvement.
Well it turns out our CTO, for a few justifiable reasons if we’re painting with a broad brush, absolutely loathed WordPress. So despite our arguments an integration would be easier/cheaper/less time consuming for everyone, we built our own CMS instead.
And we, of course, ended up with a significantly worse version of WordPress that the content folks all hated.
So it goes.
If we're handed an engineer title, I think we should be engineers. Which requires you to be a bit "grumpy". That is because the job of an engineer is to find problems and then fix them. I say "grumpy" because it is your job to find friction in a system and remove it. What I've often seen though is that acknowledging friction is interpreted as rejection and not as part of the process to make things better. Unless we get to the magic land of perfection, the job of identifying issues and improving will always be extremely valuable and naturally lead to increased revenue[0]. There's a lot of things that go into making a product "good" and this can't be entirely done from technical skills, but it is a critical aspect. Look at Steve Job's Apple. The genius was the mixture of form and function. You make computers that are powerful, have good software, AND the UI/UX is far from a second thought. Good UI/UX and shitty code don't make a good product, similarly neither does shitty UI/UX and impressive code (backend devs don't rule the world)
> The best web dev is the one that can convince their manager that their business objectives can be achieved by using WordPress.
[0] Obviously you have to weigh the costs that it takes to fix things. But identification is often cheap and easy. At least the first step of identification anyways.
edit: When I say coding, I don't mean plumbing code, I mean something that is actually a unique invention.
Feels sorta pedantic.
Fun read nonetheless.
Absolutely not. A Nascar driver isn't hired to drive to the grocery store. Or to run errands. Their not hired to drive leisurely. They're not hired to be the safest driver. They're not hired to drive the absolute highest speed either (and crash). Their hired to win races. And it's important to understand that.
The difference is that in Nascar it's very visible to everyone when a Nascar driver is driving in a way other than what they were hired for, it's not as clear for a programmer. Not to mention success as a programmer also means doing many things other than programming, including knowing when to say "we shouldn't build this".
You don't hire them to drive Ubers, sure, and likewise you want your programmers to be building things of high value. But you also don't expect them to just walk into the CEO's office, sit down in the big chair, and say "Actually, rather than writing code I can contribute more value from here, so today I'll do this job."
An academic researcher isn't hired to do research, but publish papers.
Similar to TFA, I think the issue is more about alignment than anything. Goodhart's Law creeps up slowly and can destroy any business or industry. Both can also stay off alignment for an uncomfortable amount of time. In our research example, I think it is clear we want our researcher to actually be doing research and that paper publication is a (measurable) natural result of that work, but it should be a bit more obvious to see that there are ways to increase your publication rate without increasing your research rate (or even increase your publication rate at the cost of your research rate). (Obviously I disagree with TFA's point)
Sure at the end of the day driving is a big part of it, but it’s not the only thing.
There’s what, 40 cars in the Daytona 500 and 39 of them lose. Are those 39 bad at their jobs?
In exactly the same way, a software developer isn't just hired to write code. We're hired to solve problems. We usually do that by writing code but that's not always the right approach. If your employer told you they wanted to be able to control a Windows computer from a different computer in the next room, I hope you wouldn't start writing code, you'd just show them Remote Desktop (or VNC etc.) If your employer wanted a web dashboard for your product, you might write a bit of code, but you'd try and find some existing dashboard project with an appropriate license, and hook your product's metrics up to that. Writing code is a tool, of course, and if there's no better way to do a thing (like if you're developing a new product) then writing code is going to be necessary, but a lot of times it's a tool of last resort.
You don't expect him to tell you your whole house's plumbing sucks, you have lead pipes and to properly fix the toilet you need to replace it all.
Just do the smallest, cheapest thing to fix the toilet.
Replace 'fix the toilet' with 'writing code', for programmers.
Or sometimes it is found that a good solution can be devised but which satisfies about 80 percent of the requirements, and it may be prudent to attempt to negotiate to remove the 20 percent requirements which cannot be satisfied.
i would imagine that a business owner may want to hire a business analyst to undertake such a task, rather than a software engineer. Someone ideally with domain expertise in such business problems.
A software engineer is trained to produce software, given a set of requirements. If this software engineer is also tasked with gathering these requirements, which somehow, is increasingly the case now-a-days, then he's doing more than the job of a software engineer - he's also doing the role of BA.
The real output is the shipped project, and sometimes your own code is only a tiny part of it.
A nascar driver seems like overkill, competent drivers that can deliver cars without speeding, truck drivers that can load up and move 10 cars at a time, managing a team of subcontractors who can drive on demand as needed, etc. all seem like better options.
It's fun to create a new thing or to remove an old thing that isn't needed anymore, but that's just when you can get away with it.
I'm keen to this because I maintain our CI systems and have become acutely aware of the overhead of hallucinations breaking our CI tooling in pathological ways that draw me in to diagnose. A year ago I would have to log into our CI Kubernetes cluster to diagnose a busted build that doesn't self-report failure maybe... once a month. These days it's a couple times a week. LLM based dev is both amazing in the legit force multiplier it adds to writing code as well as the way it introduces some of the most incoherent and silly ways it breaks existing conventions.
I guess the headline is correct in that we are not hired to write code anymore, instead we are hired to shepherd code now, and a lot of it. And a lot of this code we shepherd is good enough but some amount of it is bad enough to break existing processes, but that is secondary to the volume and velocity we perceive from LLM code gen.
We've turned what can be an engineering discipline into code slinging. I'll say my opinion is more focused on web development ad that's been my focus for the last 8 or so years, but I don't think that's unique to web either.
I don't use LLMs to help with coding, for many reasons that likely aren't important to go into here. I ship more code than most of my colleagues and I end up chasing down fewer bugs and production regressions along the way.
I don't have any problem with devs using LLMs if it makes them more productive, though that depends entirely on how one defines productive. As you said today it generally means shipping more code and has almost nothing to do with quality, which I'm just not willing to waste my time chasing. I'll ship quality code that I understand, and its either valued by my employer or it isn't.
Because the automation is invisible, all that the naive observer sees is the stuff breaking down and being fixed by hand, which looks like utter chaos. And they're always drawn to wonder if the system would work better if the people were replaced by automation. No, because new people will need to be hired to keep the new system working.
It's the kind of thing git worktrees was made for.
Probably because they took the money to change role rather than keep the job they wanted.
reductio ad absurdum
was he unable or was he not allowed or simply not asked? it sounds like it could be the latter which is something i'd expect from that kind of dysfunctional company, but if he was really unable then this person should not be working as a software developer.
The version I heard (or at least the one which stuck in my head) was "your job is not to write code, your job is to solve problems".
edit: I wish this was more mentioned more frequently these days. I see junior developers very focused on superficial aspects of code and specific "cool" frameworks these days. Often I find myself asking "what problem does this solve? What are the trade-offs with your approach? etc." and it's just crickets. I think we have made a lot of progress with modern frameworks, tools, etc. but I also think there is something from the "old days" of programming which we have lost, which I think we should have fought a bit more to keep.
Yes. A company doesn't exist to hire programmers who write code. Software development is a means to an end.
That’s…an argument. I think most developers, myself included, find the idea of migration to be almost impossible in many cases. The author handwaved that away too easily.
If you take that too literally and act on your own initiative in ways unrelated to your job description, you may well be dismissed for circumventing upper-management decisionmaking and not staying in your lane, even if you make money for the company in the process.
Or if you make tons of money for your company doing what you were hired to do, but do so from home in violation of a mandatory RTO order, you may quickly be replaced by someone who makes less money for your company but sits in the correct cubicle.
In reality, you're not merely hired to make money for the company, you're hired to do your job, even if it's not the maximally profitable action.
I've stepped out of my lane to make money for the company, even when explicitly told not to, but the making money part meant they overlooked my transgressions. I figured they would, as businessmen really like making money.
---
If you refuse a mandatory RTO order, you may be replaced with a less productive employee. But from a company standpoint, allowing you to violate it means others will demand it, and it may be a net loss for the company to keep you.
FWIW-- I resist this mindset, but I am sympathetic to it, I understand where it comes from. Pearls before swine and whatnot.