alt Hacker NewsI also consider myself a fairly good pragmatic software engineer. I have led small (3 engineers), medium (15), and large (100+) teams.
To me, the best time was late 90s, early 2000s. We had a lot of autonomy. People would just trusted that we knew what and how to build it. I could focus on building a great product. Overtime, we lost control, to the point that we now work based on jira tickets made by managers or product owners with one tenth of the experience that we have.
I definitely hear about segments of the industry being like that, but FAANG and adjacent generally isn't. Engineers are expected to display ownership of a problem space (scope depending on seniority), navigate ambiguity, and manage their own time.