7 ms·

From the original post: > This is why you can't be a good .NET developer, sooner or later the frustration sets in and you go and do something better. The avera

by dev360 9y ago

From the original post: > This is why you can't be a good .NET developer, sooner or later the frustration sets in and you go and do something better. The average ability and desire for something better just keeps on plummetting whilst Microsoft try to chase the brain drain by casting little nuggets of mediocrity at the people left behind scrabbling in the mud. This was exactly my progression when working .NET in 'Derpy Enterprise Shops'. I don't think it necessarily kept me from becoming a good .NET developer.. But eventually I grew cynical and tired and just gave up on the entire stack. That delta between what we were doing vs could be doing felt like it was too big. In the end though, its absolutely about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language.

Delmania 9y ago
I really can't echo this sentiment enough. You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. Did someone build a cross-platform game using Xamarin Forms and Azure Service Fabric? That sounds cool, sign me up! Then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap. Where can one find these .NET shops that strive to make use of the latest developments?
- dev360 9y ago
  Id try to look for a place to work that is more product oriented. I went another route and worked a lot with startups, but then you wont really find .NET very much.
- manigandham 9y ago
  There are several, follow the open source projects and developers and see what companies are using those and getting involved. We're a marketing startup that uses the .NET stack and it's been a key driver in building a better product faster.
- senorjazz 9y ago
  >then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap. How is that any different to 99% of startups who preach they are "changing the world", but at the base of it, are just a crud app. Only difference is they are using a "hip" language which will probably make your life more difficult than .net
  - dev360 9y ago
    You get to pick the best tool for the job, thats the biggest difference. One place I worked, every solution we did had to shove at least 2 of these ingredients into the finished product: 1) .NET, 2) SalesForce, 3) SAP, 4) BizTalk ... frequently it had nothing to do with the merits/needs of what we were tasked to build. It was simply an equation of having an IT department with these teams, and the department head for each were competing for budget and would inject themselves into the solution or their department would shrink and disappear.
    - ethbro 9y ago
      This. I just read Bezos' 2016 shareholder letter, and I feel like allowing uni-technology teams is one of the ways you become a legacy business. Once "which language will we write this in?" becomes equated to "which team gets this work?" then your company is headed down the bad path. Because now technology choices will be driven by management politics instead of technical aptness.
    - kzisme 9y ago
      Not to get off topic - but what is your opinion of Salesforce? We are just working on an integration/implementation with one of our systems, and it's quite a drag uninteresting. I don't quite understand the hype behind it, and since our motto (and other people I've spoken to) is "We're just going to move it into Salesforce!" my resentment towards it grows.
      - Illniyar 9y ago
        From my experience is a bloated old technology, with terrible UI and even worse developer experience. It is also unbelievably customizable, with one click plugins that even your grandma can add, and practically anything you can wish for already built for you. It's also extremely familiar to practically every salesperson or management out there. Basically Salesforce is to CRM what Wordpress is to CMS - the easiest one for non-technical people to use.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  You could use this template to complain about almost any programming job, not just .NET jobs.
- donquichotte 9y ago
  To be fair, I have tried to use Xamarin every half a year for the course of the past 2.5 years and have never succeeded in compiling even the most basic Android examples.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I have quite a few of them running on my S3.
- freddref 9y ago
  I feel like there is not enough "interesting" work to go around. Maybe more experimental work is seen as less likely to be profitable or too risky to implement?
  - theprotocol 9y ago
    This has to be the case. Professionally, I've always found myself lacking in advanced projects to cut my teeth on, but also too time constrained doing the routine work to be pursuing anything "interesting." I don't blame the company, of course, but I wonder if it isn't sound in terms of business to amortize some of that risk by considering that risky projects let employees self-train and learn new skills that could be of value.
  - douche 9y ago
    I wonder sometimes if, in the quest to make things "interesting" again, we fall into the trap of making the uninteresting things so damned complicated that we find that scut work foisted back on us, because the tooling has become to complex. As I survey the mess of JS and transpilers and server-side technologies that have amassed themselves before me, to do the same thing that a Visual Basic Forms app could do 20 years ago, sometime I weep and gnash my teeth a little bit.
    - freddref 9y ago
      Agreed, we may be doing interesting work horizontally, reimplementing things that have already been solved. (Maybe this is natural in the evolution of things, searching for a breakthrough.)
- alistairSH 9y ago
  Same can be said of any number of shops doing the same thing with Java or php. It's not a the language or framework, it's the work. It just so happens that the types of companies that require "yet another textbox over database site" like to use established, stable frameworks.
- TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
  >You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. My problem with these kinds of Microsoft technology evangelism articles/videos is that it always seems like Microsoft has juuuust gotten their new hotness to work, and is telling the world that it's awesome, and ready for production. Then you go to implement it, and as soon as you leave the perfect world of their demo, it all falls apart, and THEN you find out the docs were written for the beta version, and no longer apply, so you're left guessing at the right invocation signature for the method you need. My most-recent example of this was their Ruby bindings for Azure blob storage. I wasted DAYS fiddling with the docs, which showed MANY different ways to call the functions, none of which worked for me. I eventually had to have a discussion with one of the people linked to the documentation to get it to work. This sort of thing -- announcing new stuff that isn't ready for prime time -- has happened before (I'm looking at you, EF and WSL), and I expect it will continue to happen, because MS is usually playing catchup with other market hotness. I haven't used them, but I have no problem assuming that, if I were to go startup a project with the bleeding edge of, say, Erlang, or Node.js, I could find enough documentation to get a working prototype up and running without a lot of hassle. I guess it goes both ways, though. Once you muscle through Microsoft's bleeding edge, it really feels like you've accomplished something. My Rails app is sending messages, with JSON payloads, to an Azure blob queue, which is getting picked up by my internal Windows service, to be batch processed by a legacy command-line tool, and I'm having the time of my (development) life.
  - xemdetia 9y ago
    One of the things I would always recommend if you are working in the Microsoft stack at bleeding edge I would start trying to talk to the evangelists sooner than later. It feels on the outset that this is how their product cycles work so making friends with these people can help you get past the 'on rails' presentation of the demos. I say this as someone who goes to in-person presentations from these evangelist types and poked holes in their demos and got satisfactory admittance of guilt or meaningful follow-ups.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  If a .NET shop has any experience, they'll not be jumping on any MS bandwagons, it's a very risky business decision, especially if they're just making data entry software.
- mustacheemperor 9y ago
  I currently work as a .NET developer building for the Microsoft Hololens and it does feel like I might be the lucky exception. For the most part I avoid ASP etc and Microsoft redesigned a lot of the framework for UWP - it's pretty awesome to be able to write applications that build and run on a Windows computer as components of a hololens application and not need to change anything to integrate the pieces together. I think the difference is that we use .NET because "it's the right tool for the job," to quote others in the thread. Effectively, it's the only tool for Windows MR development right now. I'd be way more miserable if I was forced to be building bootstrap sites in ASP because middle management said to use it.
- Retric 9y ago
  Great developers avoid the beading edge, which let's them get stuff done. They don't give talks or write blog posts, because they are getting stuff done. So, yea you don't hear about them just what they did, because they are getting stuff done. They also tend to have lives outside of work, because they get stuff done and go on to other things. Most importantly, they avoid the long drawn out design arguments because that's mostly just bike shedding and they have stuff to do.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    Allow me to offer a counterpoint. Plenty of great developers blog and give talks while getting things done, you may enjoy post by John Carmack, talks by Sandi Metz, talks by Rich Hickey, talks and books by Carin Meller[1], talks and posts by Vaidehi Joshi[2], Kent Beck, or Dave Thomas or Elixir and Ruby fame[3]. Now, I don't know much about .Net, but in the communities in which I'm involved, the best and brightest are constantly writing, and speaking, and building great things. [1]http://gigasquidsoftware.com/#/index http://gigasquidsoftware.com/#/index [2]https://dev.to/vaidehijoshi https://dev.to/vaidehijoshi [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hDVftaPQwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hDVftaPQwY
    - Retric 9y ago
      People you know about != the best. John Carmack is significantly above average, but unlikely to be in the top 1,000 developers world wide. Linus Torvalds is a very good developer, but world class at managing developers. It's a classic catch-22. Self promoters are by definition getting less done, but without that promotion your never going to hear about them, just projects they worked on. Michael Jordan was better in very public ways, the absolute best developer at Verizon, Delta, or the DoD are not spending time competing under spotlights. PS: I am not a great developer, but I have worked with people that would blow your mind. "We stopped testing his code years ago."
      - TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
        > John Carmack is significantly above average, but unlikely to be in the top 1,000 developers world wide. "Don't you blaspheme in here. Don't you blaspheme in here!" /Aretha
- btschaegg 9y ago
  > That sounds cool, sign me up! Then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap. Hm. I'm not sure that effect really depends much on the technology used. Sure, it's a factor and tools that make you feel like they are slowing you down can suck out much of the joy of building things. But on the other hand: Isn't the true problem that you are building yet another "textbox over database site"? And you'll have to maintain it. This is the part that sounds much less exciting to me than the tech.
mariusmg 9y ago
>about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language Bingo, no matter which language is , bad culture will still suffocate you. Nothing to do with specific programming language / environment.
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
The rewards of being a good developer are too low anyway unless it's an impulse that you simply must satisfy for yourself. You'll likely just end up putting another couple of zeroes on someone else's wealth while they give you a fraction of that. I'd find something more worthwhile in life to struggle for.
- dev360 9y ago
  Getting older, I can see the draw though. Good pay, good benefits, easy work. Something to be said about that. I'd just have to numb myself with opiates or something in order to stay calm, non-confrontational and mediocre.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Having been on both sides of the fence I came to realize that in spite politics, I rather work in enterprise environments than startup ones. Maybe it is an age thing.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    Please define "good pay" and "good benefits". For me, the "pay" part would have to be substantial. The tangible benefits I currently have are average. The flextime is fantastic though (I work remotely at least once or twice a week and there is a very flexible notion of "business hours").
    - kzisme 9y ago
      (Having only been at one place thus far my opinion may be different) I've yet to come across someone who has been "happy" with their benefits package. I don't even take advantage of mine because it's such a large chunk for a single person, and yields no incentives - these I would likely consider tangible benefits (aside from the obvious). I could see it being nice if I had a family though, but most people I've spoken to use their significant others benefits package. The one thing I hope to always have wherever I work is flexible working hours. I very much dislike the stigma of "oh you're not first into the office!". Maybe it's just me though who has ran into this.
pjmlp 9y ago
> In the end though, its absolutely about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language. This is the main issue, I have been seeing this since enterprise applications were written xBase, Turbo Pascal and C. In the Enterprise, politics and developers being used as cogs trumps any kind of technology stack one can think of.
- Loic 9y ago
  I cannot upvote you enough. From my personal experience producing "enterprise" code for the past 20 years with languages starting at Fortran and ending up with VB.net with all the Python/C/C++/Visual C++/Delphi etc. in the middle, the language/stack choice is orthogonal to the quality of the code base. You can find wonderful code in VB.net and pure crap in Ruby and vice-versa. This is the company/coder culture which influences the most the end result. Blaming the tools in this case is for me the mark of a lack of experience both in programming and long term software development.
  - guitarbill 9y ago
    > the language/stack choice is orthogonal to the quality of the code base technically true, but in reality there's going to be a correlation between technology stack used and development practices. whether that's Javascript/Swift at super-agile-brogrammer $startup or Java/.NET at Enterprise Corp, Inc. stereotypes exist for a reason. he's what you can do: evaluate how much you hate an average/mediocre/horrible workflow in said language (for me, I hate anything Javascript, no matter how smart/great the devs are. some people it's the verboseness of Java, etc). then, go work for/with people you've worked before. i have yet to find another way of evaluating company culture truthfully. (interviews just don't cut it, too much potential to lie.)
    - dceddia 9y ago
      > interviews just don't cut it, too much potential to lie. That, and, an interview is a handful of hours at most. There's no way to really evaluate a culture in that amount of time, even if nobody is hiding anything. The real problems, the frustrating politics, etc only become apparent after you've been "in it" a while I think.

by dev360 9y ago

Delmania 9y ago

I really can't echo this sentiment enough. You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. Did someone build a cross-platform game using Xamarin Forms and Azure Service Fabric? That sounds cool, sign me up! Then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap. Where can one find these .NET shops that strive to make use of the latest developments?

dev360 9y ago
Id try to look for a place to work that is more product oriented. I went another route and worked a lot with startups, but then you wont really find .NET very much.
manigandham 9y ago
There are several, follow the open source projects and developers and see what companies are using those and getting involved. We're a marketing startup that uses the .NET stack and it's been a key driver in building a better product faster.
senorjazz 9y ago
>then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap. How is that any different to 99% of startups who preach they are "changing the world", but at the base of it, are just a crud app. Only difference is they are using a "hip" language which will probably make your life more difficult than .net
- dev360 9y ago
  You get to pick the best tool for the job, thats the biggest difference. One place I worked, every solution we did had to shove at least 2 of these ingredients into the finished product: 1) .NET, 2) SalesForce, 3) SAP, 4) BizTalk ... frequently it had nothing to do with the merits/needs of what we were tasked to build. It was simply an equation of having an IT department with these teams, and the department head for each were competing for budget and would inject themselves into the solution or their department would shrink and disappear.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    This. I just read Bezos' 2016 shareholder letter, and I feel like allowing uni-technology teams is one of the ways you become a legacy business. Once "which language will we write this in?" becomes equated to "which team gets this work?" then your company is headed down the bad path. Because now technology choices will be driven by management politics instead of technical aptness.
  - kzisme 9y ago
    Not to get off topic - but what is your opinion of Salesforce? We are just working on an integration/implementation with one of our systems, and it's quite a drag uninteresting. I don't quite understand the hype behind it, and since our motto (and other people I've spoken to) is "We're just going to move it into Salesforce!" my resentment towards it grows.
    - Illniyar 9y ago
      From my experience is a bloated old technology, with terrible UI and even worse developer experience. It is also unbelievably customizable, with one click plugins that even your grandma can add, and practically anything you can wish for already built for you. It's also extremely familiar to practically every salesperson or management out there. Basically Salesforce is to CRM what Wordpress is to CMS - the easiest one for non-technical people to use.
sotojuan 9y ago
You could use this template to complain about almost any programming job, not just .NET jobs.
donquichotte 9y ago
To be fair, I have tried to use Xamarin every half a year for the course of the past 2.5 years and have never succeeded in compiling even the most basic Android examples.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I have quite a few of them running on my S3.
freddref 9y ago
I feel like there is not enough "interesting" work to go around. Maybe more experimental work is seen as less likely to be profitable or too risky to implement?
- theprotocol 9y ago
  This has to be the case. Professionally, I've always found myself lacking in advanced projects to cut my teeth on, but also too time constrained doing the routine work to be pursuing anything "interesting." I don't blame the company, of course, but I wonder if it isn't sound in terms of business to amortize some of that risk by considering that risky projects let employees self-train and learn new skills that could be of value.
- douche 9y ago
  I wonder sometimes if, in the quest to make things "interesting" again, we fall into the trap of making the uninteresting things so damned complicated that we find that scut work foisted back on us, because the tooling has become to complex. As I survey the mess of JS and transpilers and server-side technologies that have amassed themselves before me, to do the same thing that a Visual Basic Forms app could do 20 years ago, sometime I weep and gnash my teeth a little bit.
  - freddref 9y ago
    Agreed, we may be doing interesting work horizontally, reimplementing things that have already been solved. (Maybe this is natural in the evolution of things, searching for a breakthrough.)
alistairSH 9y ago
Same can be said of any number of shops doing the same thing with Java or php. It's not a the language or framework, it's the work. It just so happens that the types of companies that require "yet another textbox over database site" like to use established, stable frameworks.
TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
>You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. My problem with these kinds of Microsoft technology evangelism articles/videos is that it always seems like Microsoft has juuuust gotten their new hotness to work, and is telling the world that it's awesome, and ready for production. Then you go to implement it, and as soon as you leave the perfect world of their demo, it all falls apart, and THEN you find out the docs were written for the beta version, and no longer apply, so you're left guessing at the right invocation signature for the method you need. My most-recent example of this was their Ruby bindings for Azure blob storage. I wasted DAYS fiddling with the docs, which showed MANY different ways to call the functions, none of which worked for me. I eventually had to have a discussion with one of the people linked to the documentation to get it to work. This sort of thing -- announcing new stuff that isn't ready for prime time -- has happened before (I'm looking at you, EF and WSL), and I expect it will continue to happen, because MS is usually playing catchup with other market hotness. I haven't used them, but I have no problem assuming that, if I were to go startup a project with the bleeding edge of, say, Erlang, or Node.js, I could find enough documentation to get a working prototype up and running without a lot of hassle. I guess it goes both ways, though. Once you muscle through Microsoft's bleeding edge, it really feels like you've accomplished something. My Rails app is sending messages, with JSON payloads, to an Azure blob queue, which is getting picked up by my internal Windows service, to be batch processed by a legacy command-line tool, and I'm having the time of my (development) life.
- xemdetia 9y ago
  One of the things I would always recommend if you are working in the Microsoft stack at bleeding edge I would start trying to talk to the evangelists sooner than later. It feels on the outset that this is how their product cycles work so making friends with these people can help you get past the 'on rails' presentation of the demos. I say this as someone who goes to in-person presentations from these evangelist types and poked holes in their demos and got satisfactory admittance of guilt or meaningful follow-ups.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
If a .NET shop has any experience, they'll not be jumping on any MS bandwagons, it's a very risky business decision, especially if they're just making data entry software.
mustacheemperor 9y ago
I currently work as a .NET developer building for the Microsoft Hololens and it does feel like I might be the lucky exception. For the most part I avoid ASP etc and Microsoft redesigned a lot of the framework for UWP - it's pretty awesome to be able to write applications that build and run on a Windows computer as components of a hololens application and not need to change anything to integrate the pieces together. I think the difference is that we use .NET because "it's the right tool for the job," to quote others in the thread. Effectively, it's the only tool for Windows MR development right now. I'd be way more miserable if I was forced to be building bootstrap sites in ASP because middle management said to use it.
Retric 9y ago
Great developers avoid the beading edge, which let's them get stuff done. They don't give talks or write blog posts, because they are getting stuff done. So, yea you don't hear about them just what they did, because they are getting stuff done. They also tend to have lives outside of work, because they get stuff done and go on to other things. Most importantly, they avoid the long drawn out design arguments because that's mostly just bike shedding and they have stuff to do.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  Allow me to offer a counterpoint. Plenty of great developers blog and give talks while getting things done, you may enjoy post by John Carmack, talks by Sandi Metz, talks by Rich Hickey, talks and books by Carin Meller[1], talks and posts by Vaidehi Joshi[2], Kent Beck, or Dave Thomas or Elixir and Ruby fame[3]. Now, I don't know much about .Net, but in the communities in which I'm involved, the best and brightest are constantly writing, and speaking, and building great things. [1]http://gigasquidsoftware.com/#/index http://gigasquidsoftware.com/#/index [2]https://dev.to/vaidehijoshi https://dev.to/vaidehijoshi [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hDVftaPQwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hDVftaPQwY
  - Retric 9y ago
    People you know about != the best. John Carmack is significantly above average, but unlikely to be in the top 1,000 developers world wide. Linus Torvalds is a very good developer, but world class at managing developers. It's a classic catch-22. Self promoters are by definition getting less done, but without that promotion your never going to hear about them, just projects they worked on. Michael Jordan was better in very public ways, the absolute best developer at Verizon, Delta, or the DoD are not spending time competing under spotlights. PS: I am not a great developer, but I have worked with people that would blow your mind. "We stopped testing his code years ago."
    - TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
      > John Carmack is significantly above average, but unlikely to be in the top 1,000 developers world wide. "Don't you blaspheme in here. Don't you blaspheme in here!" /Aretha
btschaegg 9y ago
> That sounds cool, sign me up! Then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap. Hm. I'm not sure that effect really depends much on the technology used. Sure, it's a factor and tools that make you feel like they are slowing you down can suck out much of the joy of building things. But on the other hand: Isn't the true problem that you are building yet another "textbox over database site"? And you'll have to maintain it. This is the part that sounds much less exciting to me than the tech.

mariusmg 9y ago

>about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language Bingo, no matter which language is , bad culture will still suffocate you. Nothing to do with specific programming language / environment.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago

The rewards of being a good developer are too low anyway unless it's an impulse that you simply must satisfy for yourself. You'll likely just end up putting another couple of zeroes on someone else's wealth while they give you a fraction of that. I'd find something more worthwhile in life to struggle for.

dev360 9y ago
Getting older, I can see the draw though. Good pay, good benefits, easy work. Something to be said about that. I'd just have to numb myself with opiates or something in order to stay calm, non-confrontational and mediocre.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Having been on both sides of the fence I came to realize that in spite politics, I rather work in enterprise environments than startup ones. Maybe it is an age thing.
- sidlls 9y ago
  Please define "good pay" and "good benefits". For me, the "pay" part would have to be substantial. The tangible benefits I currently have are average. The flextime is fantastic though (I work remotely at least once or twice a week and there is a very flexible notion of "business hours").
  - kzisme 9y ago
    (Having only been at one place thus far my opinion may be different) I've yet to come across someone who has been "happy" with their benefits package. I don't even take advantage of mine because it's such a large chunk for a single person, and yields no incentives - these I would likely consider tangible benefits (aside from the obvious). I could see it being nice if I had a family though, but most people I've spoken to use their significant others benefits package. The one thing I hope to always have wherever I work is flexible working hours. I very much dislike the stigma of "oh you're not first into the office!". Maybe it's just me though who has ran into this.

pjmlp 9y ago

> In the end though, its absolutely about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language. This is the main issue, I have been seeing this since enterprise applications were written xBase, Turbo Pascal and C. In the Enterprise, politics and developers being used as cogs trumps any kind of technology stack one can think of.

Loic 9y ago
I cannot upvote you enough. From my personal experience producing "enterprise" code for the past 20 years with languages starting at Fortran and ending up with VB.net with all the Python/C/C++/Visual C++/Delphi etc. in the middle, the language/stack choice is orthogonal to the quality of the code base. You can find wonderful code in VB.net and pure crap in Ruby and vice-versa. This is the company/coder culture which influences the most the end result. Blaming the tools in this case is for me the mark of a lack of experience both in programming and long term software development.
- guitarbill 9y ago
  > the language/stack choice is orthogonal to the quality of the code base technically true, but in reality there's going to be a correlation between technology stack used and development practices. whether that's Javascript/Swift at super-agile-brogrammer $startup or Java/.NET at Enterprise Corp, Inc. stereotypes exist for a reason. he's what you can do: evaluate how much you hate an average/mediocre/horrible workflow in said language (for me, I hate anything Javascript, no matter how smart/great the devs are. some people it's the verboseness of Java, etc). then, go work for/with people you've worked before. i have yet to find another way of evaluating company culture truthfully. (interviews just don't cut it, too much potential to lie.)
  - dceddia 9y ago
    > interviews just don't cut it, too much potential to lie. That, and, an interview is a handful of hours at most. There's no way to really evaluate a culture in that amount of time, even if nobody is hiding anything. The real problems, the frustrating politics, etc only become apparent after you've been "in it" a while I think.