Like I said: incompetent.
During COVID and after I ran a team that was majority remote and got a lot of flak from leaders and counterparts about their productivity.
I pulled up what they did. If each person gets X widgets created each week, passes quality gates and making each widget takes 15 min at best - you get the math. Nevertheless got a lot of “well it feels like” and “I just don’t feel their presence”.
Learned later in life how to better handle the perception of others, but this is one of the few places I don’t have room to be flexible. If you can’t run your team remote, you are not really managing them, you are at best drifting.
I'd also hasten a guess that the engineers at SHS are similarly below the bar you're used to.
Most SMBs in the regular world are made up of regular people and could probably be framed as incompetent if dropped into a role in big tech. I don't think it's tasteful conversation for folks like us working well-paid to point at folks in the rest of the economy and remind them how much more clever we are.
I wish I could find it, but a study almost two decades ago (way pre-COVID) found that when re remote work made good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams performed worse.
It was basically a matter of good managers understand the work and the goals and get their team to work towards that, and bad managers manage just by expecting their workers to know and micromanaging their irrelevant behaviors (like butts in seats visible to the manager, time on the keyboard, etc.) hoping to get results.
It does not matter what the field, but I count any manager in the second group as fully incompetent.
If a manager does not understand the work, the goals, and the methods, steps, and milestones needed to achieve the goals, and the irrelevant work that doesn't make real progress, how can they be judged as anything other than incompetent?