[colinmorelli]

This, but also - these arguments tend to be very one-sided. The implication is that engineers would always do the right thing if pesky management just got out of the way. Is that true sometimes? Of course, there are plenty of shit management teams in the world. There are also plenty of engineers that, left undirected, would add unnecessary scope, introduce unnecessary technology, and create different types of problems.

If there really was one answer, and the answer was just as simple as "get rid of the whole management team, and you'll have a much better product at the end" then I have to imagine companies would have started doing this already. My experience being on both sides of this coin in my career is that: it's just not that easy.

[msla]

Management shouldn't care about the stack because that isn't management's job. That's the IT Department's job. The scope of the project is management's job, as is the budget; the friction comes when they want to eat elephant on a dormouse budget, which is a good time for an IT staffer to leave if management is intransigent about refusing to understand trade-offs, but it's also the IT Department's job to explain costs and benefits in a way the non-technical can understand.

If the CEO is the lead developer and the head of IT and the CFO what signs all them checks, that's obviously different, and in that case everyone should probably understand everything. Otherwise, ask yourself how deep management gets into the minutiae of washing the toilets.