[jillesvangurp]

It's why I prefer working in startups. Less money but the amount of crippling BS you deal with is vastly less. Basically, you are the only thing on the critical path to delivering anything. A lot of what I do in startups is ruthlessly getting rid of anything that blocks me that I can't control.

I do some consultancy on the side with bigger companies that are stuck in exactly the way you describe. Because the elephant in the room is usually that product managers vary widely in quality and I've seen them be a bottleneck in quite a few places. There's this weird dynamic where you get non technical product managers act more like a CTO and CTOs act more like a VP of engineering in some companies.

Since I come in and advice at that level, I get to see this dynamic up close. Good ideas don't stand a chance in such companies and they actually end up paying me to tell them to stop doing stupid things that they already know they shouldn't be doing to begin with. A lot of companies are not long term sustainable because they fight themselves into corners like that. That's why consulting can be so lucrative. You just relay what engineers in the company are saying anyway to their managers. All you need to do is listen and talk authoritatively.

A good company would have a culture of being open to sound engineering and be empowering people to make things better. Steve Jobs famously encouraged that in his people and got rid of people that tried to prevent that. Elon Musk apparently does similar things. Neither are/were particularly pleasant people to report to but there's a pattern in their behavior that they encourage and insist on creative and critical thinking around them. A weak manager does the opposite. Weak managers are the reason consultants like me get lucrative gigs to tell them what they should already know.

[YZF]

Startups can also have know-it-all product management. Ask me how I know. It's possible to have the best and the worst of all worlds, i.e. get paid more and be in a fairly functional environment or get paid less and be in a less functional one. The only startup where you're more or less guaranteed not to put up with bs is your startup. I've worked in pretty nice startups as well but also in good larger companies.