>That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on? Pretty m

>That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on? Pretty much all the software engineering jobs have worked at have given me quite a bit of autonomy. At least within software engineering organizations the purpose of a manager should be to make sure workers have the necessary resources and coordination, but they shouldn't be telling workers what to do. I know someone that got hired at a company to answer the phone for technical questions from users. When she started they didn't have a phone hooked up yet so she asked for github access and started writing software. They never bothered hooking up a phone at her desk and she just wrote software for the next 2 years. The software she wrote was valuable to the company and was mostly self-directed. I don't think stories like this are that uncommon in the software engineering world. Edit1: Fixed typo, thanks PaulRobinson Edit2: Added Anecdote