[sologoub]

Well, facilitators and enablers will be in demand regardless of what methodology you subscribe to. For the last 8 years I've been a product manager (& director). This is one of those jobs that if you do a mediocre job, at best you'll be a nuisance, at worst an impedance. If you do a stellar job, your team's productivity will skyrocket and so will the returns on the investment.

PMs, like many other enablers/facilitators, are there to weed-out noise and make sure the team is always in the know on the relevant context and insights. When things go badly, strong PMs provide cover for the engineers to work through the storm and continuously synthesize all forms of feedback to ensure engineers have proper situational awareness and facts to make sound decisions, but not thrash in response to whatever strife might be out there.

There are other "managerial" type professions that have a place and make things better. All good managers know how to resolve conflict and make sure the team knows about any land mines, but also knows when to get out of the way and let people work. Individual development is also the job of the manager.

[lifeisstillgood]

I'm not disagreeing - except that manager-as-facilitator is an appropriate role only for skilled and usually gelled teams. Manager-as-coach are also often needed, but weirdly most of it seems to be manager-as-supervisor-meddler - it's something to do with a short term view - put people together, do no training, hope they work together.

[sologoub]

"put people together, do no training, hope they work together" that's usually a sign of an inexperienced manager.

That said, I do agree that much of what I said assumes you are dealing with adults that actually want to be there. If you have a demoralized team that doesn't want to work together, there is a whole other managerial skill set that is needed trying and bring them together. Unfortunately, often times things are too far gone to salvage all team members, especially in such market as we have today in tech - just raise a hand and recruiters beat down your door.

[lifeisstillgood]

BTW have you heard of / had experience with programmer anarchy approaches championed by Fred George?

And I suspect we are in violent agreement. which leads me to wonder what is going wrong

There are a lot of people getting paid in the IT industry, about half of whom write code. They range in skills across the double hump of software ability. And they are apparently all over stretched or on silly short timescales brought on by a poor initial estimate.

To go from just surviving to a team that guides itself takes a lot of training, social norming and individual coaching. None of which will happen with these foolish estimates driven projects.

So I am not sure I see a way forward.