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This is why it is crazy to me when Product Managers (and CEOs at small companies) don't know how to code. If you don't understand what a developer is doing, you really can't know if your feature request should take 2 hours or 2 months. And there is no way in hell for you to judge their output or how hard they are working. This information asymmetry can be super damaging to a company's progress.

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Not just ignorance of coding, in general, but of the specifics of the system.

It's one thing to add a new feature to a brand-new project, especially in terms of how soon you get visible results.

It's another thing to do it with a legacy system. You run up against all manner of edge cases within just the internal ecosystem, never mind the larger one.

It depends. I had an engineer boss, who didn't really code, but liked to toy with Linux and knew a fair bit of networking. He was good, and often told us to go home and sleep on a problem that was proving difficult.

I currently have two programmer bosses with less experience than me. They think they are helpful with decision making, but in reality I would get on a lot better without them (I know that because one was hired above me after I started, and my productivity has gone way down).

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