I work on a team of 6 devs that use this process and I can attest that it works wonders. At all my previous companies we used agile and it's remarkably slower than the "squeaky wheel process".

As long as there's trust, accountability, and a sense of ownership by everyone on the team, you don't need a structured process to be effective. It just slows everything down.

You could probably even scale this to larger companies by keeping team sizes small and have managers be the "squeakers".

Exactly what I think is the best effective dev process!

Business/management don't like that because it means that they don't have control and so that they are not 'hierarchically superior'. But also showing that a lot of them have bullshit jobs not really required.

But if you look at the successful open source projects that are independent, most of the time they work like that!