That mindset produced the big corporate labs of the 1950s to 1970s - Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, Sarnoff Labs, the Department of Energy labs, the NASA centers, etc. They got impressive results. But in time, they stagnated, working hard on the wrong problems. You have to have a well defined goal to make that work.

Of course, at the other extreme, we have the brogrammers making webcrap. "Agile" is not likely to lead to independent thinking. It's a system for keeping nose to grindstone.

We're seeing a very strong push towards political conformity, but it's bipolar. On one side, we have groups where saying there are only two genders can get you fired. On the other side, we have groups which think whatever Trump said today is gospel. This is not getting us anywhere useful.