[seadan83]

The power balance aspect to me is extremely interesting. On the one hand, there is a lot of power a manager has: - do you get the good assignments? - will your performance review cherry-pick out-of-context a worst sampling of 'goals' that were created in the last few weeks, or will it be a glowing report of what you did?

I think those managers that ask their software engineers to pound sand are generally going to be bad managers. Notably, who should you ask advice from, someone that has designed 10% of the system specs, or the person that designed 90%? (Guess what, software engineers design about 90% of system specs!) Citation needed, but the amount of specifications that engineers have to fill in is quite mind boggling (what happens to this web page if DB is slow? What happens when a user clicks this button while this other thing is still loading, etc..). So while the 90/10 split is an exaggeration, the point remains, software development is a highly collaborative activity, particularly with the engineers. Some have said that a software's engineer main job is to figure out how to achieve 80% of the benefit, with 20% of the work. This aspect is missing from the typical unit-level command and control example, notably the "commanders" in software really don't know what the hell they are talking about unless they engage in actual conversations with the developers and users.