As a tech lead I am tasked with finding ways of organising development process to achieve the result the best way we can. At some point this has to result with

As a tech lead I am tasked with finding ways of organising development process to achieve the result the best way we can. At some point this has to result with dictating how people need to behave, what is expected of them. Unfortunately, giving people just the goal and no process to get there does not work. What does work is giving people progressively more freedom after they have shown this can at least potentially lead to better results. Taking away freedoms does not work -- people become resentful, demotivated and stop working. That's why demoting people very rarely leads to good results. Giving entire team complete freedom can work with highly selected individuals who are very committed and motivated to achieve the goal. But then the reason this can work at all is because they organise themselves and they honour their internally established constraints. But those circumstances are rare in large companies and building those teams is extremely difficult. I am not naive to think I can do it and even then I usually am given a team rather than given free hand to choose whatever people I want at whatever price I find necessary. I empathize with people who don't like being constrained in how they do work, I don't like it myself. But this to some extent is required to get a large organisation working. The best solution is to do your job well and show it is in everybody's interest to give you more freedom. > And then you tell me that this is how I will be required to work 100% of the time and I'll end the interview right there. And I think it is perfectly fine. This is the point of interviewing process -- for me to find if I can work with you and for you to find if you want to work with me. For my end I try to explain and demonstrate how it would look in reality. It costs me much more to hire somebody that will then be unhappy with the process. On a more personal level I am trying as much as I can to not hire people that I would have to soon fire. I hate firing people. And more than that I feel responsible for causing problem to a person that I could have prevented by not hiring them in the first place. So in a sense you breaking the interview is win win for both of us. Hopefully there would have been screening before the interview where you would learn a bit about how we work and you would leave the process with less disruption to both of us.