>I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving engineers to their own devices. [...] The vast majority will just go off and do wtf ever they want.
I think in larger organizations this is true of pretty much everyone but in different ways. No-one's career success is very directly tied to the overall success of the company, so everyone is trying to get something for themselves out of any given project. For software engineers that might be pointless code/devops complexity or unnecessary use of esoteric and interesting technologies. But PMs, designers etc. are equally adept at coming up with pet projects that contribute little to the fundamental success of the business. There are lots of PM-driven dev teams 'urgently' working to complete features that are completely unnecessary or even counterproductive.
I think in larger organizations this is true of pretty much everyone but in different ways. No-one's career success is very directly tied to the overall success of the company, so everyone is trying to get something for themselves out of any given project. For software engineers that might be pointless code/devops complexity or unnecessary use of esoteric and interesting technologies. But PMs, designers etc. are equally adept at coming up with pet projects that contribute little to the fundamental success of the business. There are lots of PM-driven dev teams 'urgently' working to complete features that are completely unnecessary or even counterproductive.