[potatolicious]

> "I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving engineers to their own devices."

Agree with this concern but that's a false dichotomy no? "Upper management is bad" isn't necessarily proposing that engineers be left to their own devices, it's to cycle out upper management with more competent replacements.

I tend to agree with your overall point: companies where the culture encourages individual front-line teams to self-organize and ship independently tend to end up with incoherent products (see: Google). There's a lot of product velocity but almost none of it matters. You have teams shipping features because they feel like it and personally like the features, not because they offer some business value or strategic advantage.

You really, really need high-competence upper management to wrangle this energy into something coherent.

[darkerside]

> it's to cycle out upper management with more competent replacements

This is a wildly optimistic statement