[starlord]

Yes I believe the autonomy part is important and helps you learn stuff about managing expectations of all stakeholders in a product, getting work done in a distributed manner from other engineers is also an added skill (which IMHO is bloody frustrating to learn). Also I have learned a lot on maintainability and the cons of technical debts. But when something that excites you most is the joy of learning or building something new, the problem here becomes an ever growing chunk of time that goes into maintaining, supervising or corrective processes rather than creation process. Perhaps this would be true for most places... It's just that for quite sometime when you wake up in the morning and start wishing it was a holiday... something needs to be done I guess. Thanks for sharing your experiences though. It helps to know I am not alone in a dilemma over such a situation...