> It gives newer engineers more opportunity to succeed in areas where they are strong
or just gives people who can fit a mould succeed, but doesn't allow someone who is creative and can think outside the box to shine as existing beaurocracy bogs down the smallest of change.
One of the hardest challenges of being an engineer, especially at senior levels, is protecting your peers from bureaucracy - but it is a doable challenge. A corporate structure is like any other social structure and it can be navigated and changed over time with persistent work and buy in from the bottom up.
That being said, larger corporations do have more structure because they don't want you to repeat the mistakes of the past. That can obviously go too far, but if any constraint becomes "You're limiting my creative expression!" then you've missed the goal.
I find most corporate structures, levels of management and reporting requirements (that aren't legislation based) all stem from the fact that the "boss" can't trust the lower level guy to do their job and make decisions without consulting someone higher on the hierarchy.
In a small startup, this isn't a problem, because decision making happens immediately. In a large corp, you end up with bureaucracy this way.
How does other organizations that are large solve this problem? In the millitary (at least, in the US, and other western doctrine millitaries), the sqad or captain or ground level troop has a lot of freedom to make tactical decisions, as long as that decision is to move towards the goal (or what's normally called the commander's intent). Why doesn't this method work in a corp. environment?
It works where there is a shared mission. But when team A wants help with project 1 and team B’s priority is project 2, and they need approval from team C because it touches their code, well, you get the bureaucracy and constant escalation that you see in big software companies.
or just gives people who can fit a mould succeed, but doesn't allow someone who is creative and can think outside the box to shine as existing beaurocracy bogs down the smallest of change.