[oflanac52]

Very true, all the managers and their managers.. and theirs, who's technical skills have since atrophied, live in these hierarchies and its a great place for good and bad programmers (mostly bad programmers), to hide, get paid, be lazy, nice pension and not talk to anyone much, project gets binned, move onto another one. The large non-tech companies usually have this issue.

[rossdavidh]

True that, but even managers who were good programmers sometimes don't have a great ability to figure out which features, either user-facing or architectural, are a good idea and which are not really going to impact the bottom line. I saw it at tech companies as well. In at least some cases it was based on a need to impress VC's more than to get things done.