Imagine getting up in the morning and getting ready for work, like always. Now imagine not having any control over anything in your house. The only control you have is a form that you fill to get access into ur restroom, brush your teeth for example. Imagine a person opening the door and holding your brush and he is brushing ur teeth with it. You ask for another brush, maybe an electric brush, but they say that they don't have a template for this brush, they haven't heard of this brush and they don't have any training either. Either way, it's their hand and they will brush ur teeth the way they want to do it.
Similarly, imagine the same process for everything else u do in the morning. Now imagine 1000 ppl living in your house . Ur house is big enough to accommodate all these people, but it's still their house as well. Their job is to make u get ready every morning and take over everything that u used to do alone. Not that u NEEDED any help, you sure as hell don't WANT any help, but the help is FORCED on you.
Now imagine all these people are smug and cocksure of their job security. 99.99% of them are from the Indian outsourcing companies - unqualified and not interested in engineering. All of them are given the more challenging work while you are relegated to be a sitting duck, acutey aware of the frivolity and absurdity of your situation... A target for layoff. Imagine your boss, a robotic product of this environment, just doesn't give a damn abt your career. He just wants to impress his manager to get promoted. Agile is a word they use to get promoted and never practice.
Imagine that you have nothing to do all day at work. You are depressed that you now have at least 50 people who do what you were in charge of in your previous job alone. You have to deal with a labrynth of political mazes, other people's emotions and, infuriatingly, other peoples languages to make any headway here. You ask for more work, but you are given documentation work. You ask for more technically challenging work, you are told no. The reason is obvious - thou shall not threaten managers position. Also, another bugaboo they like to throw around is security. They apparently have all these layers of unnecessary manpower "for security reasons... Amex is finance company.. reputation at stake" blah blah. This is an empty excuse. No correlation between restrictive engineering practice and security and privacy.
The end result is total inefficiency. There is a reason why Indian bureacracy is one of the worst and most inefficient in the world. Well, it's taken over AmEx.
