[BackBlast]

Agreed. I've seen an org that essentially let the devs run the show for picking timelines, technologies, features. It was a disaster. Endless design by committee, no progress, too many abstractions, and on and on it went with developer created problems after being given free reign with only general direction. Of course, this is a management issue at the root, all problems are, aren't they? :)

Creating functional software engineering orgs is hard. Between dysfunctional management, lack of support from other business departments, or problems originating from the devs themselves.

It's pretty easy to feel when it's not working properly and know roughly where the problem lies. But solving it properly is hard stuff.