[typewithrhythm]

This way of working really requires a small company, (and is one of the reasons I think small places have a chance of outsized impact). But at bigger places, either a manager is being judged on a team outcome -> where an individual not on topic is budget not going towards what they get paid to achieve. Or you need seniority enough to work directly with a project director (but most structures expect people at that level to have leadership responsibilities as well).

Unfortunately, while people that work like this can be exceptional, big projects run on organised measurable work. I have found few places big enough for a specific "Manager" role to be flexible enough to get a good match to tasks.

[codesnik]

I avoid working in big companies, fighting bureaucracy is not my thing. But ordered-micromanaging-managers do happen even in companies of 10 people. One of the worst experiences like that I had in a company of _four_ people, CEO was just insufferable, we actually spent an hour every day creating a schedule for a day for everyone with 15 minutes granularity.

One thing slightly bothering me is that I have zero problem managing people both like me, and ordered stable focused guys, because I try to use people's strengths and put them on tasks which suit them the best. I've been CTO twice and can speak from experience. The only requirement for me is wanting to be useful in some form, we'll find a task, occupation, or feature lifecycle stage.

And managers who tried to put on me some kind of "personal improvement plan" clearly can work productively only with people exactly like them. Maybe they shouldn't be managers, a lot of good devs have some degree of ADHD, cutting them out or putting them in the box can't be good for business.

[typewithrhythm]

I have spent a fair amount of time in very large companies (single projects involving thousands of devs). You end up producing a whole lot of management training (and managers) in this environment, just due to its size.

You end up with not exactly an intentional bureaucracy, but one where the idea of fairness from somehow "objective" numbers becomes a focus.

This kind of works at this scale, because you need to have a way to abstract and reason about the capabilitys of far too many people than you can know individually.

The training and materials don't scale down though, so you get someone trying to apply metric driven performance in cases where it just doesn't fit.

It's generally "ok" for big business, because projects at this scale can survive on rigid organisation, simply because achieving anything at that scale is a challenge enough to be valuable.

Occasionally you see inspired leadership, but every level of management it has to go through erodes it. It's part of why it's so rare for a big company to produce anything unusualy good at scale, it takes a real alignment of stars.