Probably a very common abusive management style at high levels in many industries.
I'm often astonished by the inefficiency of project delivery, particularly in large companies.
Teams spending months building sub-systems from scratch, where there is an off the shelf(sometimes open source) tool that will do the same job and better.
Man years of work going into chasing trends like "serverless" or "microservices" for no real reason, when a monolith running on a server, could be delivered in a fraction of the time and probably do a better job than what ended up being built.
I'm convinced that paying two teams to work on the same project would often cost less than paying for the huge teams and cost overruns I've seen.
Then the "zero knowledge" psychopathic management style doesn't seem so smart.
No knowledge is going to be acquired that way.
It's a manager who has decided understanding the nature of the work is beneath him, when he can deploy someone else's money to wind up some insects that will run around doing the work for him and watch them struggle against each other. Literally zero knowledge, before, during and after.
When whatever result appears they will not analyze the meaning of what happened beyond punishing some insects and rewarding others.
Or until they accidentally burnt down the office building. You're right, doesn't seem so smart
Running two teams against each other just screams of waste/bad management in my opinion.
What could be ways to avoid such things
How did this work out at Apple? When you were there