[microcentury]

The reality of a large corporation like Google is nowhere near as simple an engineer-vs-manager dichotomy as many of the comments on this thread would make it. Products need to be developed, but they need to be supported and sold too. Which of these functions is most important depends on your world view and your tolerance for angels-on-a-pinhead debate, but it's undoubted that each of them are crucial.

An engineering mindset of automation and solution-by-algorithm gives us the miserable customer service that Google is famous for; a realisation that people are tricky and messy gives us something more like Zappos. The people who are good at support and managing support teams are not like engineers, and the people running sales are an entirely different breed. Rare is it to find someone who can successfully manage all three. Indeed, I would go out on a limb and say - as an engineer myself - that it's easier to find a non-technical person who can make a positive impact in product development than it is to find an engineering who can significantly improve sales or support.