[flurben]

This would mean having elected officials, top-level managers, who knew what software development was, and prioritized those capabilities over extended periods of time.

The top 2-5 layers of management tend to be the types who want solutions, and they don't care how it works, and they don't really want to be bothered with the details.

To the extent they expend thought at all on systems, they tend to be focused primarily on questions like, "why is all this stuff so confusing?" "who do I blame when this thing goes wrong?"

Where I work, they go through cycles; a higher-up will say "Hey let's build a staff of in-house developers." And they'll do that for 2 or 3 years, until someone reads an article in CIO magazine about how outsourcing is superior. Then they'll start unfairly purging and firing developers, writing code is now "bad", configuration is "Good." This goes on for several years, until the cycle starts over. So as a developer, after you survive your first purge, you begin to see that invisibility is the only way to survive.