The N97 was an absolute joke. A close friend of mine went through a 6 month long battle here in Australia to get his contract nullified because of the blatant lies that Nokia told about the phone.
If you're already invested in the company and it's treating you well in other areas (culture/pay/technology) then you have the choice to actively try to change the company.
It's likely that your CEO doesn't trust others to make the best decisions, which is not a great way to run a company. It's going to take a lot of time and a huge amount of effort to change this mindset by demonstrating your capabilities. I would progressively take more ownership of your own area of the business and start making some of the smaller decisions that you would usually require the OK for.
I've done this in a similar situation and it worked out for me. The owner still wasn't happy because he felt it could have been done better his way. But as I took more decisions into my own hands he began to see that it was alright to let go of control, because in the end it worked out. Good luck to you.
As someone working in this office I must warn others of the constant fear this little device instils in you. It's like working at aperture science, the emphasis on testing is maniacal.
Great article. Writing my node.js project has exposed me to all of the things listed.
One thing I have to say is that NPM is good, but good be better with it's distro integration. The ubuntu install has broken permissions by default, which forces me to install stuff with sudo. I haven't had the time to try and fix it.
His issue (though not too obvious) is that NPM assumes /usr/local is writable by unprivileged users, which isn't secure or common in Linux distros or OS X.
NPM >0.3.0 changed to requiring sudo while installing. The reason being that it simplifies things logistically as well it allows NPM to install modules as nobody, since you have to be sudo to do that.
