My reading of comments if that people seem to see two options: * Scrum/Agile/Current-hot-buzzword * PMs micromanaging via jira/whatever bug management My exp

My reading of comments if that people seem to see two options: * Scrum/Agile/Current-hot-buzzword * PMs micromanaging via jira/whatever bug management My experience in corp engineering has PM as facilitators between teams that are for various reasons not directly interacting at a planning level. I’m not actually if they create bug reports unless they’re filing actual bugs they’ve found. Generally bug tracking for feature development is essentially umbrellas so you can see where things might be getting held up, and so you can (as an IC) prioritise. Many of my assigned bugs are my own personal task bugs, again the bug tracker is helping me manage my own tasks. I’m fairly sure this is how the majority operate. ICs have plenty of freedom for their own prioritization, and generally how they get to the end goal, and they’re able to experiment if they believe their current load has the spare time. There’s never really an ability to just randomly go off into some side project without at least arranging task redistribution with your manager. Another thing to realize is at bigcorp/FAANG many engineers are working to support multiple unrelated projects, which is again a thing the PMs help with - occasional meetings between people from the different teams working on a given project helps find if there are any issues being missed. The important summary is, I guess: * no annoying formal processes like daily stand ups, etc that waste time if different people in a team are working on unrelated things * PMs aren’t driving development, they exist to support communication * ICs have freedom to choose what they work on, and how they prioritise, but have all the info required to actually do that correctly. * with said freedom ICs are expected to do prioritise appropriately and effectiveness impacts responsibility (and presumably comp) in the future * I don’t know how things differ if you’re an IC wanting to go into management/PM land because that all sounds awful so I’ve never investigated :) The way things like scrum appear structured seems to be based on a lack of trust in ICs, or a sufficient overall lack of experience among people in the org, so maybe this simply represents a valuable tool in early stage companies.