What a terrible culture, dunking on people management, calling it meaningless
And no, I don't want the Director of AI to explain react component rendering to me, it sounds like they are grooming a generation of super-micromanaging executives. Maybe the CTO was kicked out after he failed to complete 3 back to back leetcode hards
My read from the linked example was the Director built a tool outside of the critical path that was a quality of life (performance) improvement. This is a prime example of code that leaders should be writing - the team isn’t blocked by them, they can put it down at any time, they maintain familiarity with the tools and codebase (both the good and the bad), and if it lands then the team is uplifted.
If a leader doesn't understand the underlying role (at least somewhat) - they can't reason about it. The best people managers I had were good at that skill and took it seriously, but also had a technical understanding of the role.
I think it's relatively common for bad people to get hired to these management roles because the skill can be harder to evaluate than straight engineering. Hire enough of this kind of person and your company dies. It's also why managers get a bad reputation generally - good managers/team leads are excellent, bad ones are neutral at best.
To answer your question though, yes, if Ilya was Head of UX Engineering and his front-end code wasn't up to par, he should be fired.
this is a founder pushing back against having a leadership caste that can’t actually do the work to drive the business forward themselves.
AI visibility is key to gaining investor confidence (funding boom for anything AI this past year combined with funding drought for anything non-AI).