And we often hire people who have no clue how things work even for low-level management positions. Can you imagine in construction, the lowest level manager being someone with no clue about construction but is just supposedly really good at "project management"? No way that would ever happen. The "management has no idea how it all works" issue is real but it's not because the CEO doesn't know how it works. The CEO doesn't know how things work in any industry.

In SD we have people with 3 people under them who are clueless. There is no construction company in the world where a guy who has 3 people under him doesn't understand the actual work being done.

No wonder there is a trust issue when there are such huge knowledge gaps, it's not uncommon that someone's first direct superior already understands very little about what they do.

Although I have a feeling that this issue is not present at "top" companies. I have a suspicion that at a company like Microsoft, you'd have to go quite a few levels up the chain before you get to someone who is technically clueless. I doubt they'd hire some guy who never wrote a line of code and have him lead the Visual Studio team or whatever. This is something shitty companies do, it's not an unavoidable fact of life.

Basically there should never be a situation where someone's job is to write code, but their boss can't understand that code. The knowledge gap between boss and employee is too large. A boss always needs to be able to understand the work their employee is doing. If you're at a higher management level where your direct reports do not write code, then sure, you don't need to understand code.