[noahjk]

I think it all depends on finding a group of people who share the same goal of making something great together. One person who isn’t interested in that goal can be insidious to a self-managed team. And getting everyone involved means having some reward for doing well, like a validating mission or direct interactions with customers, which can be hard in some roles.

[tech_tuna]

I manage a team of software engineers. While they are all quite good at what they do and care about doing the Right Thing, collectively they're not always great at working towards a common goal.

One of the many challenges I have is that some of them will literally tinker their way to nowhere i.e. they have strong cases of Shiny New Toy Syndrome. If it weren't for me, there would be piles of unfun/unsexy work that never gets done and we'd suffer for it, and it would impact the rest of our engineering org.

It's a thankless job though, I often feel like no one likes me when I'm actually doing my job well. It's OK, I actually agreed to go back into management becauseI was terrified about the prospect of reporting to some new manager my company pulled in off the street (my old manager left).

I'll say this too, while I'm not very hands on these days, I understand what my team is doing and why and can speak with them about the details. I feel like that goes a long way helping me do my job well and understanding what they need to do, to do their jobs well. Non-technical software managers don't really make sense in my worldview.