This really only make sense to me if you don't allow developers to choose what tasks they work on themselves. Which is nearly universal, in my experience which

This really only make sense to me if you don't allow developers to choose what tasks they work on themselves. Which is nearly universal, in my experience which is now quite stale, and from the many current reports we hear about the horrors of closed allocation in the field. I keep thinking back to the hardware engineer who was also pretty good at Python who was hired by Google, who then make him write Python hardware testing code. Not wanting to end his primary career, he of course had to quit ASAP. See also "micro-management", especially I'll add by managers who are failed software developers, which was an all too common thing back when I was in the workforce (through spring 2004).