[ilaksh]

Interesting article. Autonomy (or at least a smattering of it) is definitely key to staying engaged at work.

But I would say that actually those types of research that he mentions are often pretty important aspects of the engineering. And even further, initiatives for new technical approaches or even new features can also be quite important if the project is going to stay up to date and really tackle core technical or business challenges in a robust way.

The degree that autonomy seems "extra" rather than normal in the job may be a bad sign.