I have been taking a closer look at project management and product management in the last few months. Coming from the programming side, I thought technical product manager rule the world, and thought everything that is technically led is glorious.
Then I had a very personal conversation with hardcore project manager from non-tech side. He told me that, I got the idea of management of all wrong.
Project manager is an operator where the engineers are nothing more than machine. Your standard engineer is not interested or even care about business goals. They are doing a job, they like to be told what is expected from them, they like to be told what deliverable is. Senior engineers can give an estimate of delivery date, but most don't. They are essentially cogs in the machine and managers are expected to birth products from them.
About those experienced devs: In an manufacturing plant there are things that just works and you don't fiddle with them. Or else, they break and you have to get a brand new thing. Most of these senior engineer with business focus are difficult to manage and they have an expiry date on them. You are lucky to get one, but you have to count the days until they leave for better pay. Moreover, you don't want programmers interested in business side as they get passionate about things that don't concern them which is obviously business side things. So, you need engineers to work but not get ideas.
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He told a bunch of those stories, but it seems these stories are like if you are in the business, you probably know already type things. He really doesn't buy the idea that "software engineers" are special type of engineers, he said, management hasn't change in centuries, people just use different rhetoric that's all.