How do I change situations in which I cannot work effectively as a professional programmer?

Just got my copy of "Understanding the Professional Programmer" by Gerald Weinberg. Bravo!

"Some of the methods that the professional programmer should be working on are these:

1. What should I do about a program for a well-defined problem that I don't believe should be solved at all?

...

5. How do I work effectively with people whose problems are not well defined, who don't understand as much about computers as I do, who understand more about many other things than I do, and whose motivations are different from mine?

6. How do I change situations in which I cannot work effectively as a professional programmer?

...

9. How do I work on those aspects of my own personality and problem-solving approach that are so personal I can't even see them, even though they may be the most important factor in my effectiveness as a programmer?"

Two Developers and Performance Review

Yesterday, two developers (no names) from a large company, which I don’t work for anymore, complained to me about their performance review process.

Both are my friends and both work in the same team under the same manager. One had a new component that he had to rewrite three times. Naturally, testers, PM and he himself filed tons of bugs to track this work. Other developer had reasonably stable component, so he had very few bugs.

Developer #1 was told that while he fixed all the bugs, he simply had too high bug count, and having so many bugs is simply not acceptable!

Developer #2 was told that while he had very few bugs, he also fixed very few bugs, and such low fix rate is simply not acceptable!

Ah-h-h!... Priceless.