I think that the "caring about their business" is the grandparent's point: There are a lot of bad low level and middle managers whose whole reason for being bad is either not caring or having no ability to measure employee contributions.
I think of a job I quit a while ago: I was getting all the credit in the world, as I had been hired by the rare competent manager. The department had a non-public document rating each employee and contractor, and their idea of how likely they were to leave. I got to take a peek at it, and any technical employee could use it to easily identify the bad managers, if just because their team's scores were all wrong: Terrible, toxic employees being rated as great and at risk of fleeing because they behaved like Linus. Good people that were actively looking for other jobs seen as under average but with no risk of leaving... completely wrong.
In the last 15 years I have seen plenty of good and bad developers, but, for the most part, there is little disagreements among the technical staff about each other's competence. If kept in a purely technical role, a bad employee can produce nothing. Bad managers, however, are often seen as successes by their own managers, and end up killing teams and companies.
I think of a job I quit a while ago: I was getting all the credit in the world, as I had been hired by the rare competent manager. The department had a non-public document rating each employee and contractor, and their idea of how likely they were to leave. I got to take a peek at it, and any technical employee could use it to easily identify the bad managers, if just because their team's scores were all wrong: Terrible, toxic employees being rated as great and at risk of fleeing because they behaved like Linus. Good people that were actively looking for other jobs seen as under average but with no risk of leaving... completely wrong.
In the last 15 years I have seen plenty of good and bad developers, but, for the most part, there is little disagreements among the technical staff about each other's competence. If kept in a purely technical role, a bad employee can produce nothing. Bad managers, however, are often seen as successes by their own managers, and end up killing teams and companies.