What Happened to Software Development?

Microsoft's early greatness was the direct result of a corporate culture built around enabling unbroken concentration and the disappearance of that greatness is directly attributable to abandonment of that awareness. The company built a culture around recognition of Flow, enabling entering and maintaining that condition because that was how we did out best work. We worked 70 or more hours a week and we were lucky to get 4–6 hours of actual work done in that time; all the rest was wrestling with the checkin system, with its unfinished and barely-working quality gates as obstacles.