This isn't about some puppy-dog infatuation with a spice rack or a bird house. It's about having your fucking time wasted, when you could have been out doing pretty much anything except coaxing some shitty interpreter to JIT compile a blob into some blinky lights for a herd of indecisive squawking ostrichs, amid their kangaroo court pecking order.
Hours of my life gone. And for what? A clicky-doo button at a company that might not exist in 10 years?
It ends up making me look terribly unproductive and ineffectual. Thankfully I have had good bosses who understand and back me up regardless.
Of course, this decreases the immaterial part of your value equation, so the company needs to pay you more to compensate. This is the part most companies fail to understand.
Your response might be "Please pay me enough, and of course I will." or "Hey, you paid for the cakes, what do I care?"
So, how much does five years of your life cost? Is that what developers make? What else would you throw five years away on for that money? Would you rob a bank, and do a five year prison sentence for the same amount?
At some point the trade between effort and wasted time gets negotiated by qualifiers. These kinds of things do start to matter, eventually.
Specifically, programmers like to perceive themselves as being objective and logical. This opens a giant blind spot toward the biases that we do have. The resulting cognitive dissonance allows all kinds of irrational beliefs to fester.
I used to think that the most wonderful thing about working in engineering was that engineering organizations are meritocracies. Then I realized that a organization that genuinely believes itself to be a meritocracy while being rife with nepotism is actually much worse than an organization where cronyism happens out in the open!
