"With most programmers being so unprofessional, assigning a grade school teacher doesn't even sound like such a far fetched idea..."

Wow!

FWIW, I am one who is genetically incapable of keeping his mouth shut. If something's stupid or sucks, I'll say so. If people disagree with me and have arguments to back up their disagreements I'll listen. I have zero tolerance for responses along the lines of "because I said so, just do it."

In my experience, a lot of programmers are like this as well.

There came a time when the CEO of the company where gradeschool teachers were the management was replaced... by someone who also knew nothing about development. She recognized all the problems with the product (which was being mismanaged) and I told her that the problem was management, how we'd tried to have reasonable practices, including repeated requests for a plan that we could stick to, and that the grade school teachers were in over their head. I recommend that they be put into a position to have input on the educational aspects of the product, but that engineering should be run by someone who understood engineering. She told me that there would be no management changes, and she wanted me-- given that I was the most senior engineer-- to give her a plan for fixing things. (Seemingly oblivious to the fact that I'd just given her the solution.)

I told her I'd been working on a plan and that I'd give it to her in 30 minutes. Went back to my office, wrote a resignation letter, named the fact that management made product progress impossible as the reason, and handed it to her. She said "That was fast" and I said, it's not what you're expecting, and walked out of the office, never to return. (I had been on the bubble already, and would have resigned earlier if the events that led to her becoming the new CEO hadn't occurred.)

I cannot think of anything more compelling than explaining why things were broken, making suggestions for how to fix it, those being rejected out of hand, and then emphasizing the point with a resignation. I was committed enough that I gave up my job, without a replacement lined up. I don't know what more could have possibly underlined the seriousness of my position to her.

Do you think she learned anything by this? No management changes were made, but apparently I did have some impact: The gradeschool teachers got even more hysterical and neurotic after I left, starting to accuse employees of paranoid conspiracies, etc. More and more people started resigning. The company failed not long after this.

It is my considered impression that most people who are clueless are not interested in thinking about things-- when something unusual happens, like my resignation-- they just assume that its a reflection on me, rather than the situation. Everyone working on the product knew the problem, there wasn't debate among us, but management was too ignorant to even understand that the problem was management.

The grade school teachers saw everything thru that lens-- they thought "their kids" were screwing around or wasting time, or wanting to do thing their own way rather than the way they needed to be done, and so they believed it was just irresponsibility that was causing the product problems. Meanwhile we were getting whiplash as they changed their opinions and positions and demands for what the product would do on a weekly basis.

One thing I've noticed in bad managers that is pretty consistent-- they tend to change their mind about what the product should do, and then think that their subordinates are slacking when the product doesn't do the new thing. Even thought they may have wasted 6 months under a prior plan, they don't account for that-- all those six months are credited towards the new plan, and why wasn't it done already if you had 6 months?

In the case of the grade school teachers, this product was a magical wonderland where anything they could dream up could be created-- and any time their thoughts changed the product could change without any cost at all, cause to them it was totally plastic.

So anytime someone said that these changes would take time and have impact on other things, they thought the person was just being lazy and didn't want to make the changes.

I remember once, there was a rumor that a VC firm associated with Bill Gates might be investing, and so my boss came in and told me we had to replace all of our linux based infrastructure (file server, email server, web server, etc) with Windows. "If bill gate finds out we're using linux we won't get funded!" I told him it was silly as things were working fine... so he brought in a "windows consultant" who told us we needed to buy 4 new top of the line servers to replace our one spare developer PC that was doing all the work currently, cause "You can't run a web server and and FTP server on the same machine!" Naturally the grade school teacher believed his over priced consultant- who was telling him what he wanted to hear- over his engineer.

How was he to know any different? He's a grade school teacher. (He now has a significant position at Microsoft, which I think is hilarious....)