Several critical things you cite:

"business isn't really sure what they want" - And it sounds like they're aware of that and have been forced to understand that Engineering can only do the things you ask them to do, they can't read your mind.

"We tell business what we need from them in order to do our work, instead of the other way around." This is probably the most important thing. It seems to me that the preponderance of businesses out there basically allow sales and marketing to run the show, and since they don't understand what Engineering does beyond drink coffee and consume budget, it can't be important or hard. I recently interviewed with a company with in-house engineering, and I asked them to describe how a project usually is structured there. I was told that the business decided that they wanted a feature added and picked a timeline based on their own strategy (to coincide with a trade show, quarterly earnings, etc) and told Engineering what the requirements were. The deadlines were set at that point, before Engineering even knew that the business wanted the feature. No consultation with Engineering about feasibility or resources required, just "Do this, you have until X." They had also previously asked me how I felt about routinely working more than 40 hours in a week (and, being an Exempt position, this would have meant no additional compensation). Fortunately I did not get offered the job, and would have likely turned it down had it been offered.

"We don't accept issues that don't meet our standards" - I am skeptical of this being as simple as it is stated here. Every environment I have worked in has resisted this heavily, especially when the issues being created are filed by people with "Executive" in their job title. Usually it's "This is broken go fix it" and if the person filing the issue has enough juice, nobody will dare go back to them for more information, they're far too important for that. Some companies are worse than others, but I have yet to be at a company (and I've worked for several Fortune 500 companies) where IT/Engineering were first class citizens, able to require more information to solve a problem.

"business, admin and others show up at our standups and our sprint demo" - See above, usually people who actually can make decisions won't deign to attend meetings with people who do actual work.

Increased taxes and spending are justified by progressives with phrases like "taxes buy civilization", but they choose to spend most of the new money coming in on increasing individual benefits (it buys votes, I suppose).

"Buys" votes? Isn't it possible that people are electing representatives that share their positions? You make it sound like bribery, when it's really just democracy in action. It's just not acting the way you'd like.

Starting to? It's been shrinking for years. The deficit has shrunk every year since the current administration took office, even the years when the Dems controlled Congress.

So, you're in favor of it so long as you can make a profit.

Nevermind that it's the profit motive that drives the obscene cost of healthcare in the USA. Why should we fix the actual problem, anyway?

I think your 'lazy' peers are just ahead of the curve. They already know that going the extra mile in the working world doesn't get you anything. Your boss' job is to get as much work out of you as he/she can while paying you as little as possible. Your job (in addition to what you actually do) is to do as little work as you can for as much money as you can. It's not in your interest to go the 'extra mile'. You've busted your hump for an 'attaboy' and a big bonus for your manager.

If the real world rewarded hard work, things would be different. The real world rewards those who can work the politics and get rich off of the hard work of others.

Five, if you live on a coast.

Please share. For some reason it's perfectly ok to trash a bad employee, but finding information about a bad employer is difficult.

No, the way non-technical people work (at least at the upper-management level) is that they ask their underlings for a solution to a problem, when they've really got the solution they want to hear in their heads. The underlings, who have ostensibly been hired for their expertise in their fields, give them technically sound answers, but answers that are different from what they want to hear, which annoys and confuses them. (For example, you might want to compete with Amazon, but your resources are two Java devs, a junior UX designer, and an unpaid college intern. The boss wants to hear "Yes, we can do that, no problem", when the truth is that it's completely irrational to even consider it.) Eventually, management gets tired of being told that what they want to do is physically impossible, no matter how much money it would save (and that's the important part, make sure you never spend any money, ever) and stops asking them for their input, choosing instead to say "This is what we're doing, go deal with it."

Upper management arrogance and ego are and always have been more important than technical realities. That's what needs to change. We shouldn't be encouraging CIOs to talk like CIOs, we should be encouraging people to not be fucking retards and actually LISTEN to the people they've hired to perform a duty.

Then there are the guys that equate "best practices" as "the lazy programmers trying to get more time to do something that we've already decided should take X." I consider testing/QA as an example of "best practices". At a previous job, we were in a staff meeting talking about the progress of a piece of software we were writing. The bonehead VP of Marketing asked our QA guy how long he would need to finish a testing project. The QA guy answered "6 weeks". The VP then said "You have 3. QA always takes too long."

Not "why is it going to take so long", or "what problems do you need to solve", just "That's too much time". Idiot.

Form a new union? In an at-will-employment state? Good luck with that. See you in the unemployment line.

So these challenges don't exist? Do you have solutions?

And that means that it never happens, right? And "poor academic performers" are not one of those protected classes, so it's perfectly legal to turn them away.

So, you fund an alternative school for the kids that the other schools turn away. Who's going to run it? How do you force a private company to open a location that is almost certain to lose money?

Also, what happens when nobody wants to open a school in your town, because they don't think they can make a profit?

I just don't see how going to for-profit companies to do this isn't trading one set of problems for another.

No idea how that happened.

The reason it looks like I'm skipping around is that there are so many problems with using private for-profit companies to provide critical town services. Who would decide whose children have to attend the "alternative" school? You're taking school choice away from these parents because it's more difficult to educate those children. Also, how can you force a private company to set up a school to for those kids? Such a school is sure to lose money, unless you're prepared to spend more to educate them, which seems unfair to the other children in the town, as well as putting the other businesses at a competitive disadvantage. How much do you propose regulating this market? At what point do the advantages of a free market go away, if you're going to dictate to a private company who they have to accept as a student?

So now you're saying we're going to dictate to a private company who they can and cannot do business with? Doesn't sound too free-market to me.

The trad

Ignoring the ad hominem for the moment.. What happens when none of the charter schools in your district will accept your child as a student, because they have a learning disability, or are autistic, or they're a poor student? The first two consume more resources than the average student, the third will drag down whatever metrics are used to measure the performance of a school. Are those students just supposed to not get an education?