Great article, this echoes a lot of my frustrations working in the software world. It doesn't help that I've experienced being on a well-managed software team working on interesting problems--it kinda spoiled me for all those other jobs... :)

Anybody have any advice for escaping this? I want the freedom to work on interesting things in my own way with a minimum of the politics. Ideally a PM would be someone who pushes back on all this micromanagement crap and does everything they can to make the developers' jobs easier. It seems I'm not self-motivated enough to do freelance work or start a start-up, so what other options are there?