I think the bigger question might be: “Why is so much effort being made to ‘manage’ developers and their work?” Do other departments have so many different process theories on how best to manage themselves?

From my experience, it’s because most dev teams I’ve been on are completely disfunctional. Most devs I’ve worked with won’t invest in learning the apps and the business. They want to effectively “color by number”. So, when they are given work, they are starting from zero every time. So, they can’t estimate. They can’t meet deadlines. They can’t communicate. They are slow. They are practically begging to be “managed”.

When I’ve been fortunate enough to work with good developers, we don’t get “managed” like this guy describes.