I think this is a lot of confirmation bias. Everyone has their story of cheese-head corporate IT managers making bad decisions. IT managers are like air, you only notice when they stink.
Unfortunately, I left a company with a good IT manager for an "opportunity to grow" elsewhere. Sure, I got a higher salary, and I got to move to a new city (this is the most compelling reason that I stay right now, I like my location a lot), but it's definitely one of the worst ad-hoc development environments I've ever been in.
But my previous position had a great IT manager. We took a very well defined, engineering approach to purchases and development. Identify need, research alternatives, implement, iterate. I learned a lot in a mere year and a half, more than I ever learned in college. It makes me wonder what I'm going to learn in the years to come.
You actually did development? In my current IT job, 90% of it is installing/upgrading vendorware (closed or open, as long as it's Java-based). The other 10% is writing the pieces of glue code needed to incorporate the new vendorware with the existing vendorware. That's not what I call development. It's closer to a web-centric, glorified sysadmin job.
Now that I think of it, the real problem with enterprise software and the IT departments that rely on them is more about the fact that IT departments don't seem to actually create much software, thus they're not that good at it.
This means that when talented people start working there with the hopes that they'll get to create something interesting (or at least in an interesting way) and they find out that the organization won't allow them to do anything novel, they leave.
Yes, I was actually developing industrial crane simulators of various types for the company's product line, so a significant portion of original development was necessary.
Unfortunately, I left a company with a good IT manager for an "opportunity to grow" elsewhere. Sure, I got a higher salary, and I got to move to a new city (this is the most compelling reason that I stay right now, I like my location a lot), but it's definitely one of the worst ad-hoc development environments I've ever been in.
But my previous position had a great IT manager. We took a very well defined, engineering approach to purchases and development. Identify need, research alternatives, implement, iterate. I learned a lot in a mere year and a half, more than I ever learned in college. It makes me wonder what I'm going to learn in the years to come.