True. However, I have seen largish local SW dev groups (mostly owned or on contract by European industrial giants - telecom, automotive, industrial electronics) with very '9 to 5' attitude. They did not particularly reward exellence (except that bright guys had tons of free time to pursue whatever they can while in the office), took forever to do anything, and were generally quite boring place to work. Many of them don't exist any more. That is not good, either.

I cannot blame anyone for the situation I described before, as it was in good part of my own making. I was project leader from our side. I failed to establish firm mechanism for requirements management (we said 'will do' to everything), rigid releases (all too often it was 'absolutely necessary to squize this or that in the current version'), and could generaly not say 'no' to the customer, including in regard to deployment schedule. Ah, well... one learns till one dies.