I worked briefly for a very large company where the bulk of the effort was around supply chain management. The actual production of the product was simple and relatively solved long ago -- it was so much more about branding and distribution. Early on I started to wonder if any of the people I was working with had ever stepped foot in one of the warehouses we were managing software for; or met a user of that same software.

The whole place was rife with consultants and contractors who had been working there for years upon years. I was there as a consultant (glorified contractor) and it quickly became apparent that I was there to be an evil consultant. The goal wasn't to produce the system they needed, it was to produce billable hours and ingratiate ourselves to the host such that we could land another project. We were using whole off-shore teams to do work which might have been done by one or two people locally. It was all about getting the margins on the highest headcount possible. For all of this, I was a BA, one layer off the "line" of people actually producing. The people above me only talked to other people who were neither buying the product nor producing it, exactly as the article describes. They were less interested in the product getting made than their ability to show that things were going well.

I found (actual) work elsewhere.

Half joking aside: this also reminds me of the java frameworks/architectures that got me to hate the language so much.