I hope the author and the 200 upvoters find better employment soon. The tone of the article suggests that this is assumed to be the universal way of software de

I hope the author and the 200 upvoters find better employment soon. The tone of the article suggests that this is assumed to be the universal way of software development, but it's basically the opposite of how things are done at my workplace. OP's company sounds like it's run by some Charles Dickens villains. My manager only gives me a few tasks per year, mostly administrative things like peer reviews that everyone at the company needs to do. All my real work comes from my team's product owner (not in my reporting chain, aka a product manager), who defines objectives and sets priorities for my team. My fellow developer teammates and I collaborate to give an estimate for the objective, architect a plan for it, break it down into smaller 'stories' that ideally take less than a week each to complete, and then actually implement those stories with programming. If we don't know enough to estimate something, we'll make a task devoting some time to researching just enough for an estimate. It's always collegial, often fun, and very efficient at producing high quality software on a predictable timeline. But my employer's product is basically a SaaS and the author works at a consulting company that rents our engineers by the hour. Is this kind of dysfunction the norm at consulting companies?