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Comment by rollypolly | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fairly common to see people in managerial positions without technical backgrounds. I've rarely seen it work tho.

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Agreed. It happens a lot (in all my previous jobs I had mostly non-technical people as leads), but they have to work 10x harder to be effective. I think that even a limited technical background does a lot of things for you:

1) You can scope your team's features and commitments more effectively if you have some understanding of the technical complexity of each ask.

2) Understanding the technology (and the skills of your people) means you have better intuition about the right people to bring into the room when a problem arises

3) It's easier to be empathetic with your team when you have engineering experience, because you know that many times the spec is just the tip of the iceberg.

4) Credibility. A group of devs will have a lot more respect for you from the start if they know you're not just a bureaucrat and you can code (even if it's not as well as they can)

At a previous company I had a project manager who's technical background was putting up Wordpress sites. He tried really hard, but he still made mistakes in #1-3. The company's COO, however (small company, so he was just one level above my manager), used to be a coder several years ago. So he understood time commitments and could sensibly discuss software design. I think that's what really kept the development team running, because it's sure what kept me running (deflecting "shit" and making sensible management decisions). At the very least I had a lot more respect for him, just like you say in #4.

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