A good jockey isn’t a guy who can run like a horse. A good manager doesn’t even need to know how to program, let alone be an expert debugger who can spot errors made by their team.
A jockey needs to know what a horse is and how a horse lives, trains, runs, etc.
A manager that has no technical knowledge is useless, like a jockey who doesn't see a difference between a poney and a horse or distinguish a healthy horse from an injured one.
> A manager that has no technical knowledge is useless
Thats taking it way too far. Sure; its useful for managers to understand programming concepts (deployment, testing, etc). But the job of a good manager isn't managing code. Its managing people. Making sure Sally is happy in her new role. Setting up a meeting between Jake and the sales team so they can get to the bottom of that important bug. Helping mediate that conflict between the software team and the design team over what features to prioritise.
A manager is hired to be an expert at humans. Not an expert at computers.
If managers are hired only because they're experts at managing humans, then they're inadequate for the role of managing a dev team. These guys are not just managing people, they're managing processes that they have to know something about to manage effectively.
You can't expect managers to have the same level of technical expertise as the people they are managing. In your view of the world, specialization doesn't exist.
I'm not saying i expect that at all. I'm saying they should have some knowledge about what they are managing than just being a people person. Wouldn't you hate your direct manager having no clue what a code review is? What scrum is? How features are estimated? How estimates can be widely inaccurate? What tech debt is and why it should not be swept under the rug?
