In my humble experience, the manager's experience is less important than a manager's personality.

I've seen absolutely brilliant developers fail as managers because they got so bogged down in the technical hurdles of developing the code that they failed to see the big picture-- that the project they were developing was certain to be cancelled, for example. Sometimes technical knowledge can lead to odd blind spots. One manager of mine, for example, believed that a large Perl project should be ported to Java, simply because he was more familiar with that language-- even though few of his employees were familiar with Java.

The best managers I've worked for hired bright people and worked as facilitators-- tried to figure out what they needed to do, prioritized tasks for them, and worked to make their employees more efficient. The least effective managers I've seen did the reverse-- tried to advance themselves by making their employees' lives more difficult, made priorities less clear (Me: "I can do this or that... which?" Bad manager: "Do both!"), and failed to trust their employees.

The one thing that I find useful about senior developers as managers is that they understand the software development process, which is a fairly unique activity. They hopefully won't try to manage it as though you were digging ditches ("It's not done? Program HARDER!")

A good manager who listens to his/her employees and works to make them more effective (and gets out of their way) will pick up the software development process pretty quickly-- there are a number of books on it out there, after all. (It never fails to amaze me how few of my managers have read any book at all on the software development process.)

It's very subjective, though. Your mileage may vary.

stephen

In reply to Re: OT: Tech Managers vs. Non-tech Managers.. by stephen
in thread OT: Tech Managers vs. Non-tech Managers.. by LD2

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