That is likely referring to what has become known as the standup, where developers read off the commit log for the "manager" who hasn't yet figured out how to use a computer.

I've seen it many many times, a few from myself.

It's not so hard if you're an expert in the field or concept they're asking the solution for, especially if you've already implemented it in the past, in some way, so know all the hidden requirements that they aren't even aware of. If you're in a senior position, in a small group, it's very possible you're the only one that can even reason about the solution, beyond some high level desires. I've worked in several teams with non-technical people/managers, where a good portion of the requirements must be ignored, with the biggest soft skill requirement being pretending they're ideas are reasonable.

It's also true if it's more technical than product based. I work in manufacturing R&D where a task might be "we need this robot, with this camera, to align to align to and touch this thing with this other thing within some um of error."

Software touches every industry of man. Your results may vary.

I've seen that plenty of times. I suspect that you haven't seen it because you live in a place with high cost of living, which induces a high turnover in personnel, or perhaps you've been working in very dynamic markets such as SaaS.

When I was starting my career in Europe as freelance sysadmin, I worked several times for small companies that were definitely not at the forefront of technology, were specialised in some small niche and pretty small (10-15 engineers), but all its engineers had been there for 10-20 years. They pretty well paid compared to the rest of the country, and within their niche (in one case microcontroller programming for industrial robots) they were world experts. They had no intention of moving to another city or another company, nor getting a promotion or learning a new trade. They were simply extremely good at what they were doing (which in the grand scheme of things was probably pretty obsolete technology), and whenever a new project came they could figure out the requirements and implement the product without much external input. The first time I met a "project manager" was when I started working for a US company.

Of course, sometimes people realize that what they asked for wasn't actually what was needed.

I’ve worked at one, but it required a PM who was ruthless about cutting scope and we focused on user stories after establishing a strong feedback pipeline, both technically through CI/CD/tests and with stakeholders. Looking back, that was the best team I’ve ever worked in. We split up to separate corners of the company once the project was delivered (12 month buildout of an alpha that was internally tested and then fleshed out).

Maybe I had greenfield glasses but I came in for the last 3 months and it was still humming.

How do you keep track of tasks that need to be done, of reported bugs and feature requests?