This rings true. I know a good number of folk who took management as some sort of defacto career path, without really having anything unique or special to bring to the role. A lot of them being former engineers themselves, begin to lose their technical knowledge and retreat into working with spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. You then have a situation where they are completely reliant upon engineers telling them what is really happening in a project, and what the way forward should be.

Management really should be equal in pay and prestige as to a project manager or senior HR person, but instead they end up being seen as higher up the hierarchy and privy to information on what is happening behind the scenes, until they eventually communicate that down to the engineering teams beneath them.