As someone who has worked in and with large orgs, the better question is "why does this always happen?". In large organizations "ownership" of a product becomes more nebulous from a product and code standpoint due to churn and a focus on short-sighted goals.
If you put a lot of momentum behind a product with that mentality you get features piled on tech debt, no one gets enthusiastic about paying that down because it was done by some prior team you have no understanding of and it gets in the way of what management wants, which is more features so they can get bonuses.
Speaking up about it gets you shouted down and thrown on a performance improvement plan because you aren't aligned with your capitalist masters.
At this point "ownership" is just a buzzword thrown around by management types that has no meaning.
If a developer has to put up a fight in order to push back against the irresponsibility of a non-technical person, they by definition don't have ownership.
I've seen shops where ownership is used as a cudgel to punish unruly developers.
If the task isn't done as specified and on time,
the developer is faulted for not taking ownership,
but that "ownership" is meaningless,
as you note,
because it does not extend to pushing back against irresponsible or unreasonable demands.
That the optimization pressure imposed by "capitalist masters" can lead to perverse outcomes does not imply that the optimization pressure imposed by communist ones doesn't, surely?
For instance, the GP could be a proponent of self-management, and the statement would be coherent (an indictment of leaders within capitalism) without supposing anything about communism.
Yet another new account that has only a single comment replying to me. I've noticed this is a pattern.
At any rate your point doesn't make any sense. The same point indicts all leaders, it has nothing to do with capitalism. It's like saying something indicts a specific race of people when it applies to all people equally.
> Is it your theory that working on large projects was better when you had communist masters?
It is. Unemployment was virtually non-existant in the ussr, and healthcare was not connected to employment status. So a worker there knew that saying no to their boss was not going to be a life-or-death decision. They might of course be less wealthy and so on but the worst case didn't look as bad.
If you put a lot of momentum behind a product with that mentality you get features piled on tech debt, no one gets enthusiastic about paying that down because it was done by some prior team you have no understanding of and it gets in the way of what management wants, which is more features so they can get bonuses.
Speaking up about it gets you shouted down and thrown on a performance improvement plan because you aren't aligned with your capitalist masters.