[caseydurfee]

Yeah, the article would be much more effective and useful if the advice was "if you hear these phrases, don't assume the developers are lying/bad at their jobs/etc. but do take it as a cue to ask about the business/customer value of doing ____".

Being technical or nontechnical is orthogonal to being able to ask the right questions about customer value. Nontechnical managers will go "framework? well if you say so" because they don't understand the tech. Technical managers will go "new framework? well if you say so" if the plan is technically well thought out, ignoring whether or not it actually creates business value.

[infinity0]

It's not orthogonal. Being technical, gives you the necessary knowledge to judge whether a claim that uses technical terminology to argue a business case, actually properly argues that business case or not.

There's an implicit misunderstanding here that engineers making technical arguments, are not making business cases. That is not correct. Good managers know how to interpret engineer arguments in a business context. Bad non-technical managers, will dismiss technical arguments because they aren't able to translate these arguments into a business context.

Sometimes good non-technical managers will nevertheless still do a good job by delegating this judgement based on people they trust. Someone with extra technical knowledge however, would have done an even better job.