Simon Peyton Jones would not qualify (though he has an honorary doctorate now).
In OSS scientific software, many PhDs have management jobs, where they write a couple of grand sounding fantasy roadmaps and have creative people who report to them. Printing money basically.
"Printing money" ? Really ? For the main European granting programme (Horizon Europe), the success rate is approximately 5%. In France, for funding schemes like ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche ~= the NSF in the US), it also between 5% and 10%. This means lead researchers need to put enormous time and effort into the grant application process, with extremely random results, even for the best cases.
(As someone who has sat in various pre-selection committees over the last 15 years, i.e. without a final say on who gets funded and who doesn't, I can also add that sometimes the best applications don't get funded, and average or even mediocre ones get funded instead).
And yes, in every organizations, being research or not, you will inevitably have people who end up in management and manage people who do most of the creative work. Does this mean that these managers are (or become) incompetent or useless ? I don't think so.
(For background information on this specific topic, on can (re)read The Pratice of Management by Peter Drucker (1954) ( https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/48018.The_Practice_of... -> "“The manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business” who defines the organization’s mission, develops and retains productive teams, coordinates various activities, sets goals, and gets things done.").
“The manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business”
At best this self-glorification applies to physical work like an Amazon distribution center, where one indeed needs direct people skills of a certain kind.
It applies less to intellectual endeavors in general.
It does not apply at all to software development, where a plethora of successful projects proves the direct opposite. It happens, of course, that projects succeed despite the manager, who still gets the credit.
Fred Brooks' works apply to software, not Peter Drucker's.
In OSS scientific software, many PhDs have management jobs, where they write a couple of grand sounding fantasy roadmaps and have creative people who report to them. Printing money basically.