Comment by tommorris

It's perfectly acceptable. Business optimises for least-knowledge-you-can-get-away-with.

Three generations of my dad's side of the family were in the print industry: everything from printing Vogue and Playboy to fancy art books to dull but well-paid corporate stuff (annual reports, mergers and stock issue documents—500 page books that the SEC make you print filled with legalese that nobody reads).

Most people working in big print companies know nothing about print. They don't know about how paper works or how ink works. They have no understanding of how colour works or why you can't print certain colours on certain materials, or how long certain types of print work takes. Not at the junior level and not at the management level.

Hell, if you took half the people in a big print management company and asked them to explain the basics of offset printing, they couldn't give you a "lead paragraph of Wikipedia"-level description. And that technology has been around since 1875.

For all but a small set of technical and management roles, a lot of businesses are far less interested in technical know-how than "soft skills". In a shocking number of places, the ability to build a tower out of rolled up newspaper and sticky tape in a team building exercise is valued over an ability to know the details of how the industry or its core technologies work.