Here's a galton box. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUSKTk9ENzg)

It's a meatspace demonstration of the CLT.

This was one of the most "a-ha moment" videos I ever watched back in the day. Anyone with even a functional knowledge of statistics should watch this one.

Both places are nice at times.

My ideal engineering state is heads-down-leave-me-alone. I can write some awesome code in that place.

At the same time, when a compromise has to be made, I want to know as much about the problem space as possible.

That code blip sends a shiver up my spine.

My previous code shop maintained a fairly large rails base and we mitigated that risk by doing as many things "the rails way" as possible, even if it took more time than some ruby hack.

When you consider how quickly new hires could pick up the project, it easily outweighed the extra effort designing code in a well-understood format.

That's very similar to a philosophy I have about feeling pain all the way up to the decision maker.

If the decision maker (project manager in this case) doesn't feel any consequences for their decisions, then they won't have any incentive to make good ones.