[alexashka]

The only right way to do 'great engineering' is by not having any middle management.

The only right way to do great engineering, is by first asking what we ought to be engineering, not re-implementing the same shit over and over again, like we do web frameworks in every new language.

Great engineering is completely unrelated to scrum. It is only in the delusional mind of a middle manager that his existence and thoughts are at all relevant to the success or failure of any project on this planet.

[danjac]

While "middle manager" is often nowadays a negative term, having a good manager between yourself and the upper management/customer can be a godsend. They can act as a bullshit filter, they can deal with bureaucratic busywork, they can get you whatever resources you need, fight for more funding/people for your team, help out with HR stuff and so on. You need these people so you can get on with "great engineering".

[amznthrowaway5]

Those people should not be paid nearly as much as the actual value producers.

[bickeringyokel]

You'll have to define middle management, if you're including product management, then your statement would be pretty contradictory.

Can't know what you ought to build if to don't know what your customer wants.

[alexashka]

Everyone knows what the customers want, it's quite trivial.

Most problems people try to solve using technology/engineering, are actually an attempt to bypass dealing with the real issues, which are almost always political.

One trivial example of this is children starving to death or dying of diseases we have medicine for. I'm sure there'll be another 'app' created for yet another charity or foundation.

Another trivial example of this is all the middle management and technical bullshit mobile development sweatshops go through, hiring separate developers for iOS and Android, getting them to coordinate and sync their work, working out the peculiarities of the two platforms, etc, etc.

All of these problems are solved at the political level of mandating that all mobile platforms have to support a shared set of protocols, libraries and frameworks.

All this 'fin tech' investment bullshit - it's a political problem, not a technical problem.

It's an endless list of insanity - 99% of IT work is useless trash, as are almost all other forms of work done in office buildings. It'd take a trivial amount of investment (less than a trillion) to automate away most office jobs worldwide but we don't do it, because we're stuck with a political decision to continue wage slavery. Again, political problem, not technical.