This message encapsulates why so many software jobs are terrible. Put your heart and soul into doing your best, earnestly combat NIH and pursue meaningful productivity, and _still_ the culture is such that at many companies, there will never be trust because the prevailing culture is that management is "usually right" that grunts can't be trusted.
I've worked for good bosses that aren't like this, but they're hard to find.
If you were to allow everyone to innovate freely, some would spend several weeks learning the latest shiny fad and creating things of no or negative value, like using AI to generate commit messages or adding service mesh to your single container kubernetes cluster. The disconnect from business value and writing code for the sake of writing code can be astonishing. Conversely, if you let loose one smart guy in the team, it may seem unfair to the rest of the team.
A good leader is the one who balances the need and utilizes the best of both these sides.
Trust from management isn’t all that is needed for good work to be accomplished, good managers of software development also should not shockingly know good software development.
I swear software and tech related roles are one of the few places where the managers don’t also know how to do the job of their reports.
Signed, a greybeard sick of cleaning up messes.
And I'm cynical all right. I used to believe that I could be part of a "we're all in this together" team. But I've realized how rare that is after bad experiences at multiple companies where management sees an antagonistic relationship with engineering as inevitable — because they agree with you that "grunts can't be trusted".