You are exactly the type I am talking about. For some reason these management types think of themselves as worth 10 engineers bestowed with some mystical powers

You are exactly the type I am talking about. For some reason these management types think of themselves as worth 10 engineers bestowed with some mystical powers called “managing” while having little clue about what was supposed to be produced. This is typical MBA culture and interestingly you also fail to enlighten all of us low links about what your role was supposed to be. Also, noticed that I talked about meeting other suits at customers/partners. This is not same as actual customers. Suits typically only meet other suits. Have you seen how badly designed and almost unusable some websites like banks and Fortune 500 are? That’s typical example of suit never using his/her own product, let alone meeting actual customers. BTW, knowing where your code is and how to build it is important. It tells you basic health about your engineering process. A good technical manager instinctively knows that anyone should be able to build a product or there is something very wrong. A suit will delegate and hope everything is workings out. If you managed sausage factory and if you had no clue where your factory was, that would be odd. Right? About the “hard decisions”, suits needs to hold them accountable for those results. This could be done either by getting mega salary cuts or even just resigning for producing a massive failure. I have rarely seen suits getting affected when they had to make “hard decisions”.