I’ve had that happening at a startup I worked at, it was horrible and miserable, exactly like you described, engineering went from being an interesting craft to

I’ve had that happening at a startup I worked at, it was horrible and miserable, exactly like you described, engineering went from being an interesting craft to a mere process over a few months, after an experienced VP was brought in and the original tech leads who effectively led the teams while the startup was growing were “demoted” to ICs. And this is all while the company was growing very healthily and focusing on technical scale. Internal speculations hinted at the fact that VCs pressured the founders to bring in “adult supervision”. Slowly the VP started bringing in new managers (usually first tier of management, directly managing software engineers) that were fully on board with his vision of engineering == process, I worked with these people and they were horrible from the technical point of view and completely uninspiring as managers (think about people who spent the past 10 years rotting in inefficient teams in Cisco/IBM/etc). Soon enough everything in the company had to go through jira in a very scary, inefficient and plainly annoying way (i.e. slack conversations were frowned upon, everything had to be tracked with tickets). It became a chain of assembly in a manufacturing factory. I had the misfortune to participate in a few of those internal management meetings, and it was scary as hell: instead of talking about customers, mission, visionary features (this was still a small/medium startup fighting to get market share) all the managers were talking about was process and irrelevant details related to minutiae of jira. The VP was super happy. Crazy.