Sure, there are companies out there doing it right or at least trying, but there are many who are looking to

1. Replace experienced workers with inexperienced ones at half to 2/3rds salary.

2.Hire architects to design and document complex systems and then hire the equivalent of janitors to do maintenance and upgrade work. Eventually the center cannot hold and you end up with a complex nest of band aids and workarounds worthy only of submission to TDWTF.

3.Replace creative thinking, problem solving and innovation with documentation of procedure whereby routine tasks are accomplished by following rote procedures and recipes that a trained monkey can follow, but which don't really address all the real world failure points in the process or how to even detect them much less correct them. Worse yet, since policy is to follow the procedure, updating said procedure is usually next to impossible to get approved.

Most of this comes from a fundamental mistrust and misunderstanding of the value and role of IT within an organization. IT as a whole is viewed as a sausage grinder into which many companies pour their most critical business problems and hope that what comes out is a solution everyone can stomach. IT doesn't fix business problems, it fixes Information and automation problems. If you make poor decisions and ask IT to implement them, and the whole thing goes up in flames it doesn't mean IT failed you and many companies don't seem to grasp that.

The issue with your argument is that not all cars are created equal. Many cars on the road are equipped to operate well above operating tolerances assumed for these so called 'maximum safe speeds.' That said, the problem isn't the cars, it's the drivers. No matter how awesome your car is, the real limiting factor is the other people you share the road with. If you want to be remotely responsible about it, you have to assume a bare minimum of driving ability from each and every other driver on the road with you.

Your sudden lane change to avoid creaming them while they crawl along in the fast lane, even though you've been approaching them at high speed for the last minute and a half doesn't mean they won't see your front grill in the rear view and immediately swerve into the lane they should have been driving in in the first place. You see, your reasonable expectation that they won't drift into your lane as you attempt to pass goes right out the window when put up against their important cell phone call, while they're trying to pick spinach out of their teeth from lunch and change the DVD for the three kids in the back.

For your safety and theirs, it's always best to drive as conservatively and defensively as possible. No matter how much less fun it is. Find a track, or a truly deserted place to let loose instead of your local interstate.

There are all kinds of different 'coders' these days. They have their own idioms, ideals, tools and culture. You will find people who will try to convince you that Python is the Holy Grail, others will tell you that Ruby is the one true path. (Although usually the story is so over the top, you end up missing the simplicity and beauty of Ruby, all you know is she got "Railed" for three days straight and is now servicing millions of requests, at least when she's not busy batting eyelashes at some Mongrel or really anybody as long as they have a really Fast CGI.)

Most development these days is taking place between all these tubes that make up the interwebs. That means you're usually looking at something that runs on, through or near some sort of web or app server. Set yourself up with a local web server or app server configured with whatever jingles your bells, and get to it. There is no right or wrong way to go about it, and even if you kiss a lot of frogs, you'll eventually find your favorite way to php/jruby/jython/plone/java/flex/lasso/squeak/perl_mod/whatever your way into web programming and Service Oriented Architecture (Which is just a fancy way of saying functions (which are now methods) are actually now web services, that you call remotely (But not like COM or CORBA remotely) but more like REST or SOAP remotely, but at the end of the day they do the same darn thing. Along the way if anyone asks you about relational databases, give them a smug look, shake your head knowingly and walk off muttering something about an impedance mishmash and threaten to hibernate until they propel the conversation elsewhere.

Of course, none of this is going to matter because the world will end tomorrow. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to pack my towel and go get some beer.