That's a flippant dismissal of my point. I'm not talking about chaos. I'm talking about truly difficult situations, like the team not having the skills to meet management expectations, or a dysfunctional dynamics where product or finance are making engineering decisions, or Peter-principle cases being promoted into middle management without the maturity and judgement to make good decisions. If you think the biggest challenge to engineering management is compartmentalization, then you haven't faced truly hard problems in an environment with high expectations. These things come on a continuum from easy to impossible, and it's never quite clear where that line is.