It's the intersection of responsibility & agency. One can be happy and fulfilled without responsibility and agency, but not everybody is. We denigrate those

It's the intersection of responsibility & agency. One can be happy and fulfilled without responsibility and agency, but not everybody is. We denigrate those who are as a type B personality, but that's unfair. Some few people have agency without responsibility. Rich heirs, for example. Some of them are happy, but you hear a lot of stories about them acting out for a reason. Those who have responsibility without agency are almost universally unhappy. This is where many developers are. We dislike those who carve out a piece of code and jealously defend that turf, but that is where this comes from, the desire for agency over something. Those who have both agency & responsibility are the ones who are fulfilled. The stress from the responsibility may make them temporarily unhappy, but the long term fulfillment is the most important, and it is those who have it. And it should be relatively straightforward to provide agency to developers. Let them feel ownership for a piece of their code. They'll take pride in their work and you'll get much better code out of them. Give them the information they need for proper decisions rather than just using that context to make the decisions for them.