Damn man, that sounds awful to have to deal with. Should try and find a small company to work with instead of a large corporation. My job is to write firmware for instrumentation and software for user interaction with said instrumentation. Also a bit of industrial automation stuff built from scratch. Nobody ever once got in my way, questioned my decisions, forced a design pattern on me, put me through performance reviews.. etc.. Probably because it's a small company of like 50 folks. Pretty much have done whatever the hell I want, so long as I keep on making things happen without screwing up too terribly.