Yeah that's fair but there are a hell of a lot of CRUD apps that need writing by middling software engineers who'd rather do some fun refactoring than write yet

Yeah that's fair but there are a hell of a lot of CRUD apps that need writing by middling software engineers who'd rather do some fun refactoring than write yet another boring API endpoint. I've managed enough of those teams and yes, boredom is a real problem for both motivation and staff retention. If I let people on those teams do what they wished, the app would've been rewritten 10 times by now in different cool new frameworks and the business wouldn't benefit because the core app was so dull. But there's a lot of boring software that needs writing that makes money. It is true that those teams suffered churn of people looking for less boring work ... at the end of the day the right processes (like scrum) and other things that appear like heavy management are just risk mitigation for the fact engineers don't want to work on the core problem I've spent many years working out how to deal with these situations without degrading engineers with heavy handed management.