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I can’t help but think having such autonomy is tied to profitability. I’m sure there are plenty of examples where an employee at a profitable company doesn’t have autonomy. But how many have autonomy where there's not profitability?

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I think you're close to the mark, but it's less about profitability specifically, and more about growth. A company that is focused on growing as fast as possible, dominating a market, and generating a favourable outcome for investors is only going to get there through big audacious bets in terms of product strategy. If you need to get 3x as large as you are a year from now, no amount of small tweaks for better user experience from individual developers is going to get you there. Instead, you'll find large numbers of developers (or maybe even the entire team at smaller shops) all working towards big, flashy advancements.

There's a relationship here with profitability, for sure - companies that are profitable are likely not prioritizing growth over profit, and aren't beholden to investors who want a big exit, but the profitability is more of an indicator than the cause.

Think about a financial trader (stock, commodities, etc) that place big, but risky, bets on their own initiative. The times we know about this sort of thing happening have all been disastrous to the companies they work at. Of course, what we hear about in this regard selects out all but the disasters (nature of news reporting)... and as far as I know were almost certainly not the de facto sanctioned actions of a bottom-up culture. But these cases of autonomy were anything but profitable.

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