[morelisp]

My experience is about 1/3 of developers are completely lost without a manager checking up on them periodically, between 1-5 times per week. (Varying depending on seniority, while the frequency changes it seems like the percentage does not; junior developers are more likely to get lost but not always in the ways a manager check-in helps.) By this I don't mean a one hour meeting, but something more like a standup, or just an email "hey, last week you were working on X and I didn't any updates about it, how's that going?"

If you get a team of purely the of developers that don't need this, it's great! But that means somewhere else there's probably a team that's 2/3 or worse that, and that's hell. If there's a manager, it's luckily just hell for the manager.