It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to hire competent engineering leaders. It seeps down into middle management and into the code and system architecture.
When you're an optimistic new hire you hope that things can change and you can be a part of it, but over time it becomes increasingly hard to imagine a future with a strong and wide enough cultural shift that the company could ever have the values that make working efficiently or building simple, scalable, reliable, adaptable software possible.
The HN crowd is biased, but it seems to overinflate the importance of IC engineering contribution vs the contributions of the collective - eng and non eng.
So it seems that at the top level, you need to understand the engineering part to be successful.
My guess is that the leader needs to have a vision for the product, market, but also the development. And if the last part is lacking, you cannot make up for it in the lower levels.
Or maybe it's because an engineer better understands what can and can't be build, and so has a more realistic vision for the product to build. A non-engineer always needs to backtrack with an engineer how possible something is.
Jeff Bezos was a programmer?
This is also a common English proverb
The last part (in casibus non exceptis) is usually omitted, giving it the meaning we have now. The original meaning was a little different.
However, Steve Jobs seems to be an exception here (In Dutch, we have the expression "The exception proves the rule" ;), which basically means that all theories have exceptions)
I think it's very hard for non-builders to really understand the underlying processes that result in success.