[PeterisP]

But that's not the tradeoff presented in the title "Understanding People Matters More Than Understanding Tech".

"Understanding tech" is not about choosing a tool or choosing a tech stack or picking a vendor (coincidentally, doing the latter right would be correlated with "understanding people"), "understanding tech" is about being able to build and/or configure that tech properly. In the roofing analogy, someone who uses the best shingles and hammers and other tools, but screws up the installation and the roof leaks anyways is someone who clearly doesn't understand the roofing tech (i.e. how to build roofs and 'install and configure' shingles) and we have no information about whether they do or don't understand people.

If you put the choice to that, then it's not about the quoted irrelevant choice but something entirely else - a mangling like "an unmotivated skilled team vs motivated unskilled team" isn't exact but at least somewhat relevant to the point the original post attempt to discuss; perhaps, to be generous, "a well-coordinated team of unskilled roofers with great communication and clear goals" vs "a bunch of skilled roofers each individually doing the thing they think is best without asking the customer" or something like that.

[tensor]

I don't actually care much about the title. You are very welcome to criticize it if you want, but what you are reading into the title is not what the article itself said, and the poster I replied to specifically cited the article not the title.

TLDR: we don't need to guess the authors intent behind the title, you can just read the article.

[abc_lisper]

But others do. There are managers who think exactly this - people are replaceable cogs - meaning you can treat them like that too - as tools that are like store bought

TLDR: See Boeing