They're not mutually exclusive. Plenty of managers have engineering backgrounds. What is generally mutually exclusive is managers and individual contributors. I

They're not mutually exclusive. Plenty of managers have engineering backgrounds. What is generally mutually exclusive is managers and individual contributors. It may be that if individual contributors did all the decision-making then the outcome would be different; it may be that it would be exactly the same. We can't really know, for the same reason we can't know how society would be different if we elected "normal people" to Congress instead of "politicians."