At GE the aviation engineers were the only ones that really seemed happy. They were all working under grey beard engineers who were by far the least pretentious

At GE the aviation engineers were the only ones that really seemed happy. They were all working under grey beard engineers who were by far the least pretentious managers. Everyone else was under someone from the encient GE Taylorist philosophy of "a good manager can run anything." Very painful uphill battle on anything because you literally had to translate everything into a message that informed them of how it was going to make them look good and advance their career. They simply don't understand or care about the work/product/customer. You could literally build amazing shit with a lot of support from colleagues etc and it didn't interest them because they had no foundation to recognize the potential. If you did manage to have one or two of your managers (I had five-ish) that did see the impact potential the rest of the hierarchy or "matrix" would smother it. Not to mention the clueless (horizontal) scrum masters.