What's all this business about ranking that you're talking about? I didn't mention it. And asking engineers to rank each other? Seems you've picked some bad

What's all this business about ranking that you're talking about? I didn't mention it. And asking engineers to rank each other? Seems you've picked some bad companies to work at. You should consider working somewhere where management is deeply technical. At everywhere I've worked, the entire eng-management chain (up to CEO) fully understood the domain (as you put it), the state of the art, the key system architectures, and so on. The idea that an eng manager's role should be limited to "developing human relationships and being attentive", would simply not fly. Eng managers need to be able to go into code, and they must be able to gauge the complexity of the work under them, or they'll be unable to spot the difference between someone aggressively chasing a nasty heisenbug for weeks, versus someone struggling for weeks to put together a basic block of working code.