A lot of companies are run with the Taylorism hierarchy. The people at the bottom are making the widgets. The layer above them are the managers, who are good at

A lot of companies are run with the Taylorism hierarchy. The people at the bottom are making the widgets. The layer above them are the managers, who are good at managing workers. A layer above them are executives who are good at making strategic management decisions that the managers will implement. That system worked well during WW2 and postwar America. Someone who was a manager at an airplane factory could move to another company and be a manager at a washing machine factory. While it is true that some management and people skills can transfer between industries, the big problem with Taylorism in tech is that the skillset needed to make the right management decision is orthogonal to the skillset required to get into a traditional executive role. Andy Grove, from Intel, was very successful at adopting a new management framework for this scenario as described in his book "High Output Management" Not everyone is as a good of a manager as Grove, so you still see a lot of managers following Taylorism hierarchy. And that requires that engineers assume the lowest level of the system and accept that their "managers" are qualified to make decisions. Young people without much exposure to the business side of things are much more likely to accept these positions. Managers are afraid of hiring someone 40+, who may know both the tech side and business side of things and be aware of management mistakes due to the manager's lack of technical expertise.