What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

I've worked at both SV and traditional companies, and I feel like this very closely matches my experience. One of the things I worry about is that even at companies that are doing "Agile transformations" and adopting methodologies like Scrum, in practice have "Product Owners" who are there to give instructions via Jira tickets. Other roles like "Business Analysts" are there to ensure that lowly developers never have to worry about things like understanding the business themselves. So I get…

It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs. IMO there’s probably a good reason for it, namely some institutional memory of when engineers would just defect en-masse and literally destroy your company if you pissed then off enough. But it also makes me a little sad that other white collar jobs don’t have the same benefits. There are probably a ton of jobs where people work just as hard…

I've had the most autonomy when working in large, traditional companies. In my stints in energy and banking, I was basically handed a platform and told to run with it - maintain it, expand its functions, work directly with stakeholders, and just do what is needed. The leadership trusted me to handle it, and consulted me on enterprise-wide tech strategies. When a big project came up where I could not handle it on my own, we'd get support from a…