One of the things you can infer from this is that these people don't think the workers need to be supported by management. This is one of the most common forms of inefficiency I find, though. Management resents workers so much that they don't enable them to do work properly, due to a bias which leads them to believe their workers should be able to do more with less. A failure to invest in a functional work environment and content workers only leads to lowered productivity in a vicious cycle.

In my mind these guys are essentially telling on themselves for being clueless about most of what they're designing the software for. They think they get it, they're super confident, but when it comes down to it they're designing software based around very constrained and biased ideas of how factories should operate. They think they're innovating but they're actually trying to entrench patterns they think work well (but might not at all). Not bringing anything new or interesting, but regurgitated ML patterns other people innovated.