I'm an engineering manager with a coding background 12 years coding, 3 years managing, and "assigned as task" throws a red flag for me. I believe we should be (a) understanding what preferences and skills each engineers have (b) have a conversation on how they can best make impact using these (always comprises, sometimes a project just needs to be done and they're the only one free, but by that not being the norm, they don't mind), and (c) setting a goal for them to achieve (rather than a "task"). E.g. expose an internal REST endpoint providing these parameters with this latency and scale by two weeks, and letting them determine the tasks needed to get there. (obv this goal should be set together as well, not dictated).

This absolutely does happen and is a problem. Funny seeing so many replies mischaracterizing what you're saying.