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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

Because you end up being much more effective if you know what you are doing?

Managing a team of developers without any idea how to do the work is a disaster.

Of course, having some experience doesn’t guarantee you’ll be an effective manager, but without it you’re almost guaranteed to fail.

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That's only the case if the manager meddles in technology and doesn't know how to delegate properly (or hire properly). I would say a manager who does those things is inherently a manager who can't scale and is unlikely to ever work well with senior technical people.

As a manager my goal is to use as little of my technical knowledge as possible but rather to let my senior technical leaders do that part instead. I've got so many other things to handle and deal with that being technical except at a high level seems silly.

"I've got so many other things to handle and deal with that being technical except at a high level seems silly."

Like what?

I probably missed some but a general overview:

- Helping figure out the right goals and metrics for the team and ensuring everyone is on the same page.

- Holding 1-on-1s with team members, non-technical feedback and yearly reviews. Seriously, yearly reviews are a massive time sink if you actually care and spend time on them.

- Passing around information to the team and making sure they are involved in the right meeting/conversations.

- Attending various management meetings that usually could be replaced with a wiki page.

- Resolving non-technical issues my team members are having. This includes listening to venting sessions, complaints and general bitching. Need to handle these situations in a diplomatic non-judgemental way.

- Keep track of team non-technical blockers (people, process, etc.) and try to resolve them (short or long term). This includes resolving product management issues and other teams blocking my team.

- Keeping stakeholders close and happy

- Selling the team, it's vision and achievements broadly

- Hiring

- Planning team promotions and executing on those plans. This includes telling your team members what they need to do to get promoted and then ensuring those promotions happen.

- Non-toxic (or toxic depending on the company) politics

- Talking to random people in the company for networking. It's amazing how much people from HR will tell you if you are friendly and get coffee with them.

Sounds like a lot of useful stuff but you'd still be better if you were more technically knowledgeable.

I am and like I said I'm actively trying to not leverage that skillset. I'm not in the weeds anymore and I cannot be due to the other things I'm responsible for. Someone making technical decisions who used to be an expert, isn't an expert anymore but can override decisions is a horrible mix.

I still don't buy this. You talk about scaling the team: how can a manager says to HR "I need N new hires in 2022 because we have projects X Y and Z" if you don't have the technical knowledge and experience to know how complicated those projects can be? How are you going to protect your team from extra work or starting a stupid project if you cannot recognize it? Those are tech skills and a good manager must have them.

I'm very confused, is your team made of nothing but juniors? Or are senior engineers not trusted at all? I simply ask my tech leads and senior engineers to give me an estimate. Then I trust them.

In my experience engineers hate it when an out of touch manager makes an estimate on their behalf and then they are forced to do crunch time to meet it.

edit: Also most projects come via the PM who would coordinate with the tech leads directly for planning and scoping.

Obviously you ask the team but many times you might be in some meeting and it's just you because you don't want to drag an engineer in yet another meeting... isn't what they all hate? I don't really see technical knowledge in an engineering manager as a bad thing, really.

There should be a process for project planning other than "a manager was in a meeting and agreed to it." That process should not require people to show up in meetings.

This brings up my overall view that being technical can often make a manager take short term shortcuts. That works right until it no longer does and then you have a broken team and culture and processes. Not thinking technically means you are forced to implement good long term processes and not keep monkey patching things. For example, if the managers keeps making these decisions in meetings then senior engineers will wonder how they can have their voice heard except by going into management.

There’s exceptions to any rule. So far working for nontechnical managers has been invariably exhausting. I don’t doubt that managers exist where this isn’t true.

Even if they trust me to provide them with estimates (and they understand that 9 women cannot have a baby in a month). I have to spend a lot of time just constantly communicating the information they need, and why certain things need to happen so they can tell (and satisfy) their stakeholders.

In most places I've seen it's the non-technical PMs that deal with stakeholders so having a technical manager doesn't help that much except as an escalation point. And more broadly I feel if you're having to explain technical information to stakeholders then you've failed in much deeper ways. The person handling them should have built a good reputation of trust and provided good communication on what stakeholders really value. Very rarely have I seen them to really value technical details but rather ask for them when they simply don't trust the team anymore.

Indeed. Also, you have plenty of time do to both. Start as an engineer at 22, write code for 15 years. Switch to management at 37. That still leaves you with 15+ years to climb the career ladder.

So am I guaranteed to fail at developing a platform for selling used cars if I have never worked as a used car salesman and have no idea how they work? Of course not, I am supposed to acquire the necessary understanding by talking to users and subject matter experts. I think the same holds for managers, you can understand and manage a software development process without having been a developer. Does experience help, could former used car salesman develop the platform better, could former developers manage the team better? Sure, but only if they are also good in their current role, if they are good developers or a good manager. And being good in your current role comes first, having experience in the field you are writing software for or that you are managing is an added bonus.

If your technical knowledge is 20 years out of date, as an individual contributor you can't be hired although worst case you can't do much damage. On the other hand if your technical knowledge is 20 years out of date, then its much safer for the company to put you in charge of direction and goal setting and hiring decisions and so forth.

A Visual Basic 6 programmer "can't" be hired to program in Javascript, although its the same people and skills 25 years apart. However put that VB6 programmer in a management role and somehow that completely obsolete technical skillset is "invaluable", LOL.

Yes, because from a business standpoint, you should care where your product is going to be after 20 years, and the VB6 programmer knows that eventually JS might not be a thing and will think of architecture decisions like 'we'll have to transition this to another language, how should we make that process easier?'

Likewise, some lessons transfer. "Huh, that time we were working on Thing X and relying solely on Bob's technological expertise we were completely screwed and the company went under after after Bob had an aneurysm, I should make sure there are no single points of failure on the team knowledge wise."

Or "Man, we built such a beautiful Visual Basic 6 program, but the interface was so bad nobody used it and we failed. Let's make sure our front end and back end people are communicating properly." Or, "This was the most elegant technical solution, but then it turned out nobody had the resources to run it. So let's make sure to do our user testing and make sure we're designing appropriately."

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