Five Things the Best Developers Do 

well said, what has been your biggest challenge to incorporating someone new with your team's culture?

a lot of time there is an issue with managers that dont know jack shit about programming, and basically parrot whatever the lastest trend has been and only care about spreadsheet stats. there is a good blog by ludic, named "your organization probably doesn't want to improve things". i found it a nice read, its about the manager-employee dynamic, and it justifies sometimes ignoring managers under specific circumstances, so thats why i disagree with the ignoring the boss part. i mean, if the boss tells you to do something and then lets you do it, thats absolutely ok, but if the boss keeps disturbing your workflow by having meetings every hour to track the progress or something every hour or so, it justified to ignore the boss for some time and even skip on some of these meetings