> The pointy-haired boss is a manager who doesn't program. So the surest way to avoid becoming him is to stay a programmer.

Staying a programmer is a good way to avoid becoming a pointy-haired boss, but I’ve seen many programmers become pointy-haired bosses even as they continue to write code. The most common way good people become bad bosses is to blame people for their mistakes, because they’re nervous about the commitments they make and don’t know how to leave themselves enough options. The closer you are to the code, the less likely you are to suffer from this prolem (but it still happens).

Jenny Greene and I wrote about this in Learning Agile: https://twitter.com/AndrewStellman/status/971810876830502912