When I was a youngster, the eight bosses line made me laugh because it was absurd. Deeper into my career, it makes me laugh because it's true. On a good day, o

When I was a youngster, the eight bosses line made me laugh because it was absurd. Deeper into my career, it makes me laugh because it's true. On a good day, on an unimportant project, I still have three bosses. I have my team lead, my PM, and my actual manager. Currently I'm on a cross-team project of critical importance, so you can add on my manager's manager, his manager, the other team's manager, and his manager. I've got seven goddamn people breathing down my neck on this. I used to work at a place where I had one manager, even for critically important projects. He was the only one breathing down my neck (and that wasn't often). No PM constantly hassling me to groom my backlog[0], the managers above my immediate manager all had enough trust to not directly meddle. Most productive I've ever been in my career. Ended up leaving because I just didn't give a shit about the project, but sometimes I dream of going back... [0] I need to rant about this. How am I supposed to be agile if I have to have my backlog completely planned out for the whole project? And I can't just estimate it or backlog the big chunks, because when we start making progress and I update the backlog to reflect things we've learned, I have to justify every single change to my PM who will grumble that we are going off plan. If I don't update the backlog, I get grilled about how accurate it is at the next too many cooks/status update meeting. We can either do agile or try to plan out the next six months of work at the start. Stop trying to make me do both.