This is way too simplistic. In reality, everyone has a role, and if you don't understand that role then problems occur. The fact is, in every organization ther

This is way too simplistic. In reality, everyone has a role, and if you don't understand that role then problems occur. The fact is, in every organization there's the technical side and there's the political side. The bigger the organization the more need there is for a political, not a technical, manager. The former manages the people, stakeholders, etc. The latter manages the product itself. In many organizations both roles are done by the same person, who tends to do one side better than the other. In engineering organizations the manager is probably more on the technical side because engineers. The problem is that large organizations (insert your definition of large, it could be >20) or organizations with multiple customers managing upstream expectations and prioritization are really important. These people are paying the bills, after all. At that point you need to start fending off salespeople, account managers, and other executives. Unfortunately, telling customers to fuck off you're busy isn't the greatest path to customer satisfaction, retention, etc. You need a political manager to do that for you. I know of a few large orgs that have formalized this tech/political manager structure, because it's effective. But you need to understand what's happening and why. If something rolls downhill to engineering it's because the political side believed it was required; you need to accept that. Likewise if the political manager gets pushback they need to understand that the issue is real. So taking a step back, the article is complaining that you should have managers that understand what engineers do. I'd flip that - we need engineers that understand what managers do. Engineers are not special. Neither are managers. It takes people working together to get stuff to happen, period.