I work at a company where developers choose the work. It's complete pandemonium. Nobody is listening to the product managers, the technical leads are doing customer interviews, the incompetent senior engineers have created a terrible mess for everyone else to deal with (and then moved on to new projects to create another terrible mess). The biggest issue is that engineers, especially ICs, absolutely are not giving a shit about anything except their own work, AND they are the only ones with any modicum of authority.

The people with any standards at all only stay ~2 years or less at a place like this.

> I work at a company where developers choose the work.

I meant that as part of professional development, technical leaders should have increasing say over the tasking of themselves and the team they're helping lead. There's lots of room to innovate and experiment on exactly how that works.

I'm thinking on the level of:

- If we haven't deprecated these old machines in 18 months, we're wasting piles of money

- This legacy code is too complex, but it will take some time to remove, so we need to start now

- Given the revenue numbers and the amount of maintenance effort we put into it, this part of the system and these features need to be removed. Let's split off a scrum of three for about a month to do it.

"Let the devs choose the work" would seem to naturally imply that they must also complete and maintain their work. That would curb the tendencies you describe.