I once worked at a company whose culture slogan was "by hackers, for hackers." They're renouned for hiring top-notch programmers, and they really do. Ironically, since hackers don't understand management, they tended to evaluate managers only on their technical skills, not (much) on their people or organizational skills. As an added bonus, the company was in a protected industry and their first product (created in startup mode when they were really small) was a game-changer, so they were wildly successful. So they basically had the attitude "we're really successful, therefore we don't have any big problems or need to make any big changes."
Their second product was a much larger engineering effort than the first, probably 4x as many engineers working on it. I had friends working on it, they had lots of stories about poor management. In the end, it was many years late and over budget, and a year or two after the financial crisis hit, the launch partner pulled out, and the company now had a reputation of not delivering, so nobody else would touch them. (Protected industries are generally conservative, they were lucky to find one customer willing to take a chance.)
tl;dr: good hackers don't know much about management, so when left to choose managers, they're likely to choose bad ones.
This sounds a lot like a concentrated, high-speed version of what I read happened with Sun. I have only read articles here and there about it though; anybody know a good analysis of Sun's problems?
It's not really like Sun. Sun couldn't accept that it had lost the hardware game a decade before its demise. It had great kit, it was just the market was so vanishingly small that it was never going to support the mothership. It had also lost the will to give "mavericks" the freedom to do their thing. It was firing them a decade out.
"Management" at Sun was pretty tight. It's just that it didn't require that sort of management.
Their second product was a much larger engineering effort than the first, probably 4x as many engineers working on it. I had friends working on it, they had lots of stories about poor management. In the end, it was many years late and over budget, and a year or two after the financial crisis hit, the launch partner pulled out, and the company now had a reputation of not delivering, so nobody else would touch them. (Protected industries are generally conservative, they were lucky to find one customer willing to take a chance.)
tl;dr: good hackers don't know much about management, so when left to choose managers, they're likely to choose bad ones.