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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

"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.

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