This might sound like a flippant response but it's not: could you move into management? You don't need to know the finer details, but you'd have the experience required to empathise with the developers in your team.
This might sound like a flippant response but it's not: could you move into management? You don't need to know the finer details, but you'd have the experience required to empathise with the developers in your team.
Bad idea. Managers need to know a different set of finer details, not none at all. While individuals on a team have to get deep into the details of what they're doing, managers need to work at the edges - where what Team X is doing integrates with V, Y and Z; and longer term, how what all of those teams are doing now fits in with the work lined up 6-24 months down the road. That's a full time job, even before we've actually done any managing of our individuals. Maybe this gives you some insight, but that's actually why (in my opinion) the first things to fall off with poor managers are 1x1s, meaningful coaching, etc.
Managers also have the stresses of accountability and expectations. There are days where I wish I was still an individual contributor.
I liked him at the time, but once I had a new manager I was blown away at everything I was missing from a more fully-qualified manager.
Now that I recognize that kind of manager - I see a lot of them. OP probably could make it as a manager - and I say that from having seen so many of these managers move up the chain. But I think other commenters are right: managers shouldn't believe they don't need to comprehend details.
It's not trying to comprehend 1000 little things at the same time using deep concentration, as a software developer does.
It's become really common in engineering, particularly in orgs doing agile, to split resource and functional management. I don't care for that. I spent a long time as a product owner and wondered quite often why I couldn't just absorb the resource manager's responsibilities as well, since the only thing I wasn't doing was writing reviews. Every other problem rolled up to me, since I was accountable for the outcome.
Some companies work that way, but they are bad companies to work for, IME.
Other companies, managers have got where they are because they know more than anybody else and have the personal skills to marshal a team into solving bigger problems than what is on the board for this sprint alone.
Source: ex-CTO, now Senior Engineer again, done every level of management you can think of, choose to be where I am for a reason, but do not think managers are idiots.
Call yourself an idiot if you like (I don't think I said that anywhere?) Managing is a difficult task that requires knowledge and skills. But not Engineering ones.
There's another name for when a Manager is telling his Engineers how to solve problems: micro-managing
Btw there is an interesting trend in London where individual contributors (at least in Big Data) are paid more than their managers - that's because ICs are brought in as consultants at 500+ quid a day, while companies often insist on managers being full time employees, who genrally get paid less.
At the end of the day the problems you find on the technical side only reflect in resources spent - human resources, time, budgets... beyond some level - usually the managers level and above, that's what matters and the only thing that counts.
In a lot of organizations the technical side is literally in a bubble, doing their thing and protected from the chaos of dealing with ignorants, burocracy and shit.