[elnygren]

Oh my sweet summer children. Feels like the author has perhaps never worked on a complex, big product or with any capable engineering management.

The worst and biggest messes in software engineering that I've seen have been situations where there was not enough engineering management. And those situations were fixed by... introducing proper engineering (and product!) management.

That being said, it is perhaps possible to survive with less engineering management in a situation where everyone is behaving and performing at senior or above level. However, realistically, that is very rarely the case.

[feoren]

Similar to the other top comment, you're saying everyone who believes this must be naive and/or immature. Except that's the opposite of my experience: the most capable, longest-tenured technical people are the ones who are generally most jaded about management. Myself included.

I believe that there are probably a lot of problems out there that can be fixed by "proper engineering management". The problem is that 95% of what's out there is improper engineering management, which makes everything even worse. The whole point is not that engineering management is completely unnecessary, it's that in actual reality it's a trumped-up support role with false authority and completely swamped with utter bullshit. It's not done properly; that's the whole point.