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Here, as the company's gone through some changes in the last year or so, we don't have a non-technical manager making IT decisions . . .
. . . we have a gaggle of them that meet and reinforce one-another's decision making ineptitude.
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I've worked for some managers who knew programming, but not enough (anymore) to actually participate with the team.
Luckily, they understood their knowledge was outdated and they respected my technical superiority.
The plus is that they understood that a "small" change could take hours or even days.
They also knew how important it was to keep code maintainable and technical debt to a minimum, so you'd get some time to fix that now and then.
On occasion I could even ask them for their opinion on some technical problem and they'd come up with good ideas (or at least ideas that sparked the good ideas in me  )
One of those managers also maintained legacy apps that he once wrote, which was cool, except...
He developed and tested on production environments, which wasn't such a big deal as you'd expect, except that I was in charge of keeping databases in sync, which is pretty much impossible if both are ahead of each other 
Of course he kept doing that because he'd "always done it like that."
I currently have a non-technical manager (and a non-common sense manager at that) who just threw three extra developers in the team because we had to work faster (I've never got less work done than the past few weeks)...
The problem, however, was not that we had too few developers, but the constantly changing specs and priorities that he sets 
So yeah, technical managers all the way!
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Sander Rossel wrote: who just threw three extra developers in the team because we had to work faster
Been there, work is not getting done fast enough, so they add more developers, juniors at that. Though I don't mind taking-on and onboarding new people, it had the opposite effect and made the team even less productive in the short run.
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This is where having a technical manager pays off. Having been promoted from a Senior Engineer position into management I know enough to ask the team what they need to hit a deadline rather than assuming I know. I am also a vocal advocate for the guys that work with me as I know what having a useless manager is like.
One of the best things from my point of view though is that the teams that I work with are using a technology stack I am unfamiliar with, so while I can give broad direction or listen to technical discussions and make intelligent comments, I do not feel the need to put my oversized management paws into the code.
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Sander Rossel wrote: On occasion I could even ask them for their opinion on some technical problem and they'd come up with good ideas (or at least ideas that sparked the good ideas in me )
I agree. Even if they are not up to speed on the latest tech, once a developer, always a developer. They still possess the basic skills to understand a problem, break it into steps.
I work for a Manager who is also a developer on our team, so he is involved in the day to day.
I think it's great! 
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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The manager must be technical enough to understand the product. Other than that, I am happy with any decent person who shields the team from politics and process, so they can get the job done. You'd think this would be easy, but its remarkable how infrequently it occurs
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I don't care if techie or not techie manager. I just like one realistic manager with common sense that knows my technical value, gives me enough freedom to do things the way I consider the best option, feeds me with the relevant information I need to do my job and keeps me free of non sense meetings or moronic people that waste my time.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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MatthysDT wrote: From my experience, I prefer reporting to non-technical managers. I found that the technical know-how and guidance I used to seek from technical seniors is mostly available from any diverse group of peers and juniors, each with unique interests and strengths.
Exactly. Managers should facilitate communication between the people that are actually doing the work and as Eric said, keep the politics and bean counters at arms length.
In my opinion, anyone can be a manager if they have communication skills and the ability to get the problem solvers together. Certainly demands from higher up the food chain (or, if you prefer, lower down in the sewer of the C-level people) need to be communicated to the team, but again, it comes down to communication and letting the people that know the work solve the problems with the given constraints.
In other words, a good manager, in my opinion, is a facilitator and a buffer and little else.
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Non-technical managers cannot distinguish a database diagram from their sandwich recipe and therefore whenever a decision has to be made with conflicting opinions about a technical issue, they either don't make it or defer to the technical person with the most brown nose.
That's a fact.
My current job though has a manager that has enough knowledge to make competent decisions.
BTW the chaos that non-techie managers create is the major reason for the wave of outsourcing, not the cost.
modified 20-Oct-19 21:02pm.
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After being a developer for almost 10 years I became a manager in a different company. I let the team decide on best course of action to achieve a business objective without getting too involved in minute technical details. At the end of the day business doesn't care if you have used X or Y as long as it functions the way that serves the purpose. Only time I had to intervene was when someone try to over engineer a solution that is going to be irrelevant in next few weeks. Keep the deadline in sight and keep the team happy.
Zen and the art of software maintenance : rm -rf *
Maths is like love : a simple idea but it can get complicated.
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I was working in a group that were growing too large, so it had to be split into three, with separate group leaders, and we were discussing what would be the "ideal" background for a group leader. We found that the ideal would be a person with a formal management training, and preferably some experience, working with us for a year as an apprentice to see what we are really doing, what are our daily problems and issues and mode of work.
After one year working at the floor, he would probably be a much better manager, from our point of view, than if he was simply brought in from the street and put in an management position, no matter how good a management education he might have.
(No - we did not get what we wanted. The most experienced technical guys advanced to a management position, without really knowing what managment is about.)
On the other hand, the sales side: When your customer is technically competent, rather than an end user man-in-the-street, nothing beats having a salesman who can explain how every single bit flows, can make qualified estimates of the work required for customer demands etc. Salesmen who knows all the buzzwords and nothing else are worse than non-technical managers, who at least know something about management.
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Technical vs. non-technical isn't the factor for me -- it's clued-in vs. clueless.
The best manager I had was non-technical, but I didn't know it for 3 months. He educated himself on the technologies so he could speak intelligently, yet relied on in-depth knowledge of others when making decisions. I worked for the guy 3 months before I learned he wasn't technical -- he was sales.
The worst manager I had was highly technical, but a PHB. Completely clueless about everything, and relied upon similar people for his 'facts' while dismissing the the folks that actually knew something.
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(Note: this a govt IT dept)
My team's immediate manager is completely non-technical, though our director, when hiring him, led us to believe he was very knowledgeable. As it turns out, he is not. At all. I don't think he could use a calculator effectively. It grinds my gears that the status report we are required to update constantly lists him as "manager" on all our projects, and that he makes more $$ than me, the team lead. Amongst ourselves, we refer to him as "meatloaf". Having status meetings with him is an exercise in futility as I have to explain things multiple times and I'm sure he still does not understand anything. I find non-technical managers tend to focus on the idiotic things they can control and grasp, like "some of your people were late punching in this month" (yeah, we punch in/out, like we work at a supermarket). Yeah, OK, they're late. They're also very talented and productive, and turning out excellent work every day, so give it a rest. I guess, in my case, it's not so much meatloaf is non-technical, it's that he's stupid. But, that's the plague of working in government. Sometimes I wonder what the hell is gonna happen here when I'm gone...
(edit:grammer)
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There's gotta be a Dilbert comic in there somewhere.
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The best bosses I have worked with had genuine humility. And it didn't matter what their level of technical knowledge was.
The worst bosses I have worked with were arrogant. And it didn't matter what their level of technical knowledge was.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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My current manager is both arrogant and uses an authoritarion management style. He neither shields us from outside abuse nor does he do anything to help work efforts. The problem I that I have had is that I have worked for truly worse and keep sticking my neck out. I have had great managers both technical and non-technical and have found that although it may be a factor, it doesn't determine which is the better boss or manager.
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Agreed.
(I truly hope your current manager doesn't frequent The Lounge.  )
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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His background before this position was hardware and he barely knows our industry. The odds are stacked deeply in my favor that he would never visit Code Project at all.
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Good managers put people in a position to succeed; bad ones throw people at projects without doing analysis of what skills the project needs.
Good managers hire smart people and trust them to make good decisions, or to raise flags if they don't have the skills/experience to make a good decision. In that latter case, good managers find the right resource to be another opinion (which may be themselves, if they are technical and experienced in that area). Bad managers don't trust their employees, or are unwilling to consider alternatives.
All that being said, I prefer an at-least-somewhat technical manager. By that I mean, someone who understands data and relationships, and can have that sort of conversation, even I they don't know the nuts-and-bolts of schemas, application development, etc. If we model the data well, we've got a good foundation on which we can build the application layers.
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In my experience they are all terrible, rude, authoritarian, arrogant, and in general stupid. However, there is one rare exception; non-technical managers who know they are non-technical and as result stay out of the technical details letting me do the project properly...
However, as I said, this has been a rarity...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I have found the best success in having
1. A non-technical manager
2. A technical lead.
The non-technical manager is an HR manager, the time off manager. They can help with sprints, and planning, but not costing, and not how to do something. Has one-on-ones. Keeps team unity. Plans activities. Helps keep communication open (especially with a bunch of introvert engineers)
Tech lead - Is the mentor technically. Has technical one-on-ones to make sure each team member is increasing their skill level.
The problems with a technical manager is that most engineers:
1. Don't have the skills to be a good manager, because it is hard, and takes a lot of training, and they are never trained. So it takes them three to five years to be any good and by then, they already have a bad rap.
2. Many will never have social skills to be a good manager.
3.
As always there are exceptions to the norm. Great technical managers and great non-technical managers exist. But on average, I find the best harmony when a non-technical manager is combined with a tech lead.
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Thanks for the SARS clip. O M G . . .
I guess it depends on the size of the department. I am the technical manager, and I'm reasonably successful. Myself I prefer a non-technical manager, my boss is an accountant, but he is technical enough that he can back me up sometimes. I call on him when I need people help, when we have policy issues that require conformance or if I am trying to schedule something big - and of course around budgeting projects.
In a bigger company, I have seen mixed results from a non-technical CIO. The problem with that is that the honchos put the person in the area to achieve a business goal, not really aligned with operations. So she was there for a little while on the way to another position.
It's not her fault exactly, but the corporation outsourced all of IT as of 1/1/2000. It was a nightmare. My entire team and I left over 6 months. (Me: After I rehired for my position of course) Chasing "shareholder value" can be destructive. It was the non-technical managers who bought the crack the salesman was selling. 
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I would love to have manager that has technical abilities. Unfortunately I get some people who are looking at log files and are screaming WITCHCRAFT - BURN IT.
If you can read log file and decide that you don’t need to involve whole team and ask everyone around to participate you are gold.
If there is some configuration issue because someone forgot to change setting or add setting to a file, and don’t have to involve 5 people to fix it you are gold.
If there is small irrelevant code issue that slipped past through code review,
and QA and you can fix it on your own before demo for stakeholders instead of screaming that there is issue bringing end of the world you are gold.
For such person it is easier to maintain faith in your team because they know small issue in config is not some hidden dragon. It is a lot easier for technical person to grasp possibilities of technical team.
Maybe it is only my ego but I really get annoyed when people make fuss over stuff that I can fix in 2 minutes. Especially when they go around screaming that sky is falling and reality is that when you read log files it is perfectly understandable issue. Even more annoying when they send log statement with exception to you and it is perfectly literal exception message like “cannot connect to 3'rd party X” and 3'rd party X is down, but somehow their comprehension goes wild…
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