I was at Apple during the golden SJ era and it was like this. I remember asking my manager (in my first year or so, fresh out of school) about something and he replied "That's what we're paying you for!"

I was at Skype during the eBay years and it was similar. Lots of autonomy. Then Skype got sold, Silverlake instituted Scrum training for everyone, and well, look what happened. Product owners took over; the engineers became Jira-ticket minions.

That said, I do understand the problem with giving engineers too much freedom, if there's not enough maturity on the business side. I've been at places like that, too. Engineers gone wild. Just burning money.

I see too many startups adopting Agile/Scrum for lack of a better clue on how to run software development. These days I refer people to Basecamp's Shape Up for "just enough" structure.