Actually, I was at Microsoft between '94 and '05 and that's close to what happened in many cases, but not because of a single program manager. (At least not in cases that I saw directly.) Rather, as the company grew, and more program managers and project managers were assigned to things, a lot of developers felt less in control of their work due to the collective influence of a non-programmer organization.<p>That kind of growth probably has to happen. To be fair, most all the program managers had engineering degrees, and some had been successful developers. The project managers came from a different track entirely, and I think that was a more challenging relationship for a lot of developers.