Comment by bruce511

>> So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?

Because engineers are typically (although not always) terrible at business. Or marketing. Or Sales. Or whatever.

In other words, a successful business needs many skills. One of those skills is management. It's inevitable that top management (who's core skill is hopefully, well, business) needs to people to do the other skills. Marketing, Sales, Engineering, and so on.

Hence those skilled people need to communicate with management in ways in which management can understand. They can then make sure everyone has aligned goals. It's no good if engineers are doing one thing, marketing is doing something else, sales is targeting the wrong demographic, and so on.

It seems to be a unique conceit of software engineers that "management just gets in the way". When, more realistically, management is trying to communicate the business requirements, and we feel we know better.

Most engineers (again, not all) are terrible at the actual business part. The list of failed companies, multi-year solo projects that never sell a single copy, and so on are evidence of this. Joel made his name writing (literally) "The business of software".

So back to your question;

>> why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?

because how else will engineers know what to do?