Well, technical competence and expertise does not necessarily translate to managerial competence and expertise. It's two distinct skill sets. Getting machines to work is very different than getting people to work.
This can't be overstated. The best engineer could be the worst manager.
That said, managers should have at least some level of technical knowledge on what they're managing. I'm a security engineer that once worked under a CISO who had very little technical knowledge and it showed. Having to explain things to him multiple times got frustrating. We're talking on the level of "Hey, our nmap scans are showing we have port 443 open on our web app. We should have all ports closed." and then trying to explain why that would make our web app completely inaccessible.
100% spot on, I couldn't agree more. That was the biggest thing I learned during my time there. It was painful at times, but a very important lesson to learn.
Being a technical person myself, and working in a small company most of my life I was blissfully unaware and then shocked. I guess it's true that closeted existence did leave me blind. But I don't think that is a consequence of being technical or an engineer - it was just because the smaller companies I preferred to work for would go broke if they made dumb decisions or failed to learn. The shock came from the small company I worked for being taken over by a huge, word wide company. And then watching that huge company roll over all their internet links to Optus.
All technical people get to know what it's like to deal with the big two telco's in Australia. They all eventually figure out the smaller ones provide much better service and a sharper price, and then avoid the big ones like the plague. So we knew what would happen when we went to Optus, and it panned out pretty much as expected. That's perhaps an exaggeration, as them leaking most of their customer credentials onto the internet wasn't "expected", but then level of engineering incompetence that lead to the leak wasn't a surprise either.
What was a shock was seeing first hand how Optus won the business. All the rules that engineers live by, like basing decisions on empirical data, "trust but verify" and so on weren't part of it. Instead it was smooth talking salesman, mandatorily weekly meetings with implementation teams who contribution seemed to be to presenting spreadsheets proclaiming how much progress that had made, paid trips to holiday destinations for upper managers and cases of wine being sent to lower managers. Later came the lies, and when we called out the lies and dug up older versions of spreadsheets to prove things weren't going a planned white anting. The white anting worked - we were threatened with dismissal.
Those tactics only work for so long of course, and eventually the exec's that threatened us with dismissal ordered us to get rid of Optus, at any cost. Fawning turned into literal hatred. They could away such displays of corporate disloyalty only because by that time all the managers who championed the charge to Optus had gone.
But despite that experience, they moved to Telstra. Telstra is the other large telco in Australia, and is just as bad. I had left by then, but I assume the decision was made by a new cohort of managers who will also be gone in a few years.
At this point I'm no longer blind, just flummoxed.
