[bratbag]

What happens is that an otherwise productive engineer has to step up and perform the role, but without any recognition of the extra responsibilities or any reduction in expectations of their individual contributions.

So then they find a job somewhere else and another otherwise productive engineer has to step up.....

Meanwhile the other engineers continue on blissfully unaware, patting themselves on their backs for how they don't need to be managed.

[015a]

I've seen this happen in smaller teams; it can work well! Productive teams and skilled engineers can manage their own workload. Not all of them want to do that, so that needs to be taken into account, but it can work spectacularly.

I've also seen it work poorly. We've already established that there are good and bad EMs; there's good and bad in everything. That doesn't justify the role of the EM!

I've also seen PMs do this. This is the far more common situation, and it works! Workload planning ends up being a collaborative effort on the team, with the senior engineers holding domain knowledge over operations, maintenance, architecture, implementation, while PMs/Designers/etc hold domain knowledge over the business, customers, etc. Work once in an environment like this; well, at least a good one; and it will make anyone and everyone question why EMs exist at all. There's no room for them. They wouldn't contribute anything even if they were added to the mix.

[julik]

And no extra agency and no extra authority. I've been in that spot, had the best 4 months of my life (lack of authority was painful). Then 2 clueless managers were hired above me.