Hi,

Question posted anonymously for obvious reasons. I am working in a company with a dev group of 5-6 developers, and I am in a situation which I have a hard time dealing with.

Every technical choice (language, framework, database, database scheme, configuration scheme, etc...) is decided by the CEO, often without much rationale. It is very hard to modify those choices, and his main argument consists in "I don't like this", even though we propose several alternative with detailed pros/cons. He will also decide to rewrite from scratch our core product without giving a reason why, and he never participates to dev meetings because he considers it makes things slower... I am already looking at alternative job opportunities, but I was wondering if there anything we (the developers) could do to improve the situation.

Two examples which shocked me:

• he will ask us to implement something akin to configuration management, but he reject any existing framework because they are not written in the language he likes (even though the implementation language is irrelevant). He also expects us to be able to write those systems in a couple of days, "because it is very simple".
• he keeps rewriting from scratch on his own our core product because the current codebase is too bad (codebase whose design was his). We are at our third rewrite in one year, each rewrite worse than the previous one.

Things I have tried so far is doing elaborate benchmarks on our product (he keeps complaining that our software is too slow, and justifies rewrites to make it faster), implement solutions with existing products as working proof instead of just making pros/cons charts, etc... But still 90 % of those efforts go to the trashbox (never with any kind of rationale behind he does not like it, again), and often get reprimanded because I don't do exactly as he wants (not realizing that what he wants is impossible).