I think in many tech companies, the founders were engineers, and knew how to work with engineers. They could handle "what's the feature set going to be?" in th

I think in many tech companies, the founders were engineers, and knew how to work with engineers. They could handle "what's the feature set going to be?" in the way that you describe. (Also, that kind of management is easier to do with a smaller organization.) But when MBAs took over, they only knew how to MBA. They didn't know how to manage in an engineering culture, so they turned it into an MBA culture.