> One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way.
I wonder if the overall trend in tech is that engineers are experiencing less bottom-up autonomy and more top-down controlled environments. I would be curious to see how many tech companies (or the average engineer's experience) have changed from being tech led where engineers have autonomy to being more product management led. My suspicion without evidence is that the overall engineering autonomy has decreased over the years as the culture of tech has (in my opinion) shifted away from tech focus to more business, management, product focus with engineers just as the widgets who are tasked with fulfilling the goals of business, management, product.
> One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way.
I wonder if the overall trend in tech is that engineers are experiencing less bottom-up autonomy and more top-down controlled environments. I would be curious to see how many tech companies (or the average engineer's experience) have changed from being tech led where engineers have autonomy to being more product management led. My suspicion without evidence is that the overall engineering autonomy has decreased over the years as the culture of tech has (in my opinion) shifted away from tech focus to more business, management, product focus with engineers just as the widgets who are tasked with fulfilling the goals of business, management, product.
all hypothesis, only anecdata