A lot of start-ups in my experience see all their engineers as “high-autonomy feature implementors.” It’s not really autonomy in the sense of power or choice,

A lot of start-ups in my experience see all their engineers as “high-autonomy feature implementors.” It’s not really autonomy in the sense of power or choice, though, just being left alone to implement features. The thing is, “features” are product-level things that require technical design as well as implementation. Product design and implementation and technical design and implementation are all different things. Even within programming, implementation has sub-problems that require creativity. I implemented a Java VM, once, for example, and it was really fun. So it’s not necessarily the case that once something is a matter of “implementation” it is just straightforward work to give to a junior programmer, or that implementing things is boring. What sucks is, for example, being good at technical design but that not being valued. And management being disconnected from employees, which is not unique to software companies.