Its not a fantasy, this is path represents a huge percentage of managers/higher ups in software

> Its not a fantasy, this is path represents a huge percentage of managers/higher ups in software

It's also a part of the reason why at least historically there is such an insane hate for managers in hacker culture.

This was my experience after my startup was acquired. My boss, and my skip level were both former QA folks who'd never done any SWE work. I had more YOE as a SWE AND as a manager than both combined.

I worry this whole comment chain is celebrating a coping mechanism of troglodytic engineering, that the ideal is to shape artisanal code-crystals undisturbed in a cave. We all wish there was a simple meritocracy of crystal-fashioning, with the master diamondsmiths sat at the top. If only, enough said.

The political savviness so scorned by the in-the-trenches coder might actually be communication, capacity for broader context, strategic foresight, emotional intelligence to debug and optimise teams, among the many other skills required to execute a product/project beyond programming. And good leads will pluck coders showing these skills out of the engineering corps and set them on a TPM track.

Perhaps it is only rarely the case. But it seems fair to observe that it is gentler on the ego to cast these rare and hard-earned skills as “playing the game”, PM mumbled-jumbo, etc.

At the same time, operators in bad faith tend to deploy just these skills, and a bad experience can incline one to wash their hands of it all and crave the rough diamonds of the cave…

No these teams with these people tend to be totally dysfunctional. It's not the case that they are skilled at producing value and doing important things for the product, just playing the game (often in a very evil way)