I have experience of both. I ran a Microsoft practice at EDS, where there were too many managers. The highlight of that one was losing a multi-million £ contrac

I have experience of both. I ran a Microsoft practice at EDS, where there were too many managers. The highlight of that one was losing a multi-million £ contract because another project manager felt my approach didn't produce enough paper work, stopped the project and started gathering requirements, again, formally. After that I worked for a smaller software house I'd better not name, where I was responsible for 70 developers. I had no idea who was working on what because no one ever did what the status reports suggested. I resigned. The frustration in both cases was that engineering management has been solved. It's been solved in the 80's. Any attempt these days to introduce principles I learnt from books like Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions, Peopleware or Mythical Man Month got rejected, because most organisations these days have a chosen way of doing things that some manager thinks of as a personal fiefdom. Any attempt to stray from the defined approach is squashed, like, immediately.