Most companies have a mix of skillsets needed in the employees, and so you end up with the technical folks doing technical work, and folks managing them, who are typically less technical. But there is a basic technical competence level that needs to be maintained, or the managers end up wasting everyone's time with bad ideas.
Case in point:
Our application generates a ton of data. So much that the clients need to be in the same datacenter to get it at the rate we produce it. The remote datacenters do not have enough incoming bandwidth to receive the data in a timely fashion. One day we were discussing this problem, which limits the locations of our clients, and one of our project managers suggested "Why don't we just use the cloud to get it to the other datacenters fast?"
I mean, ya gotta have the basics in your head to play the game right, y'know?
