It's not really. Good management is really hard. That being said, lots of other functions (sales especially) have a bunch of senior people who want to manage, so it's easier to pick the good ones.
In engineering/more technical fields there are less people who actually want to manage, so you end up picking from a smaller pool.
Is there some direct reference to Zippy and Emacs? That connection seems less likely than the extremely common and well known phrase "are we there yet?"