Yes, managers not coding was caused by ZIRP. It's a dumb idea.
- You need to understand the work to evaluate your team
- You need to understand the work to prioritize and rank what's important
- You need to understand the work to know which roles to hire for
- Good developers typically don't want to have a non-technical engineering manager
- The budget for a non-contributing team member reduces your budget for engineers
- It creates a more hierarchical and less flat org chart, which creates communication scaling challenges
I would only consider non-technical managers for companies with large budgets and a non-technical product. Not only should they be technical, they should be excellent.
- You need to understand the work to evaluate your team
- You need to understand the work to prioritize and rank what's important
- You need to understand the work to know which roles to hire for
- Good developers typically don't want to have a non-technical engineering manager
- The budget for a non-contributing team member reduces your budget for engineers
- It creates a more hierarchical and less flat org chart, which creates communication scaling challenges
I would only consider non-technical managers for companies with large budgets and a non-technical product. Not only should they be technical, they should be excellent.