<p>“The companies I’m familiar with would never hire someone to manage engineers or technical people unless that person had a lot of engineering or technical experience.”</p>
<p>What it really boils down is whether there are technical people that want to and have the aptitude to move into management. Business majors are usually already oriented for those positions, so their initial motivation may be better and their previous work experience may be more specific to handling those roles. E.g. it’s not necessarily efficient to move senior engineers into paper and people work, if they’re more useful and happy as senior engineers. And maybe business majors can’t be put to technical work either. So there may be a division of labor of some sort.</p>
<p>But there are also companies where management barely exists, people/engineers manage themselves (or there are senior engineering personnel for doing the coordinating), so what is left is just the paperwork and perhaps “strategy” relevant to running the company.</p>