Well, that works when you manage a small team, but if you were in charge of say, Google Search or Microsoft Excel how would you go about managing hundreds or thousands of developers? Knowing you can't even be around the several hundred team leaders, let alone every developer, so managing by feel becomes impossible. You have thousands of new, and leaving engineers, you need some kind of order to the chaos...

Personally, I only tackle problems where I know I can keep the team small and in constant contact. We work remotely, and prefer Haskell, both of which self-select for people who are capable of managing themselves and working in such a setup. But it wouldn't scale to Google or Facebook scale, I don't think. Maybe Whatsapp.