Slashdot Mirror
Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive?
theodp writes "Some say that good managers should not be technical at all. Over at Computerworld, 'C.J. Kelly' takes a contrarian position, arguing that managers should keep their hands on the technology. The ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, says Kelly, is priceless." From the article: "If you don't know the difference between fiction and reality, you've got a problem. By being technically informed while managing people and projects, no one can blow smoke up my skirt. I can tell the difference between a lame excuse for a delay and a legitimate reason why something can't be done." Where do you fall on this issue? Is it nice to be able to flim-flam the boss once in a while? Or is the valuable input of a boss with a technical background worth the occasional all-nighter?
Of course it's "nice to be able to flim-flam the boss once in a while," but that doesn't make them a good manager. I'm sure that the their boss wouldn't see it that way if they knew what was going down.
Does this even need to be said?
I mean, come on! How much easier the lives of techies would be if their boss was one of them, if he would actually understand?
I think it depends on what kind of background the boss has, specifically. If they were formerly a member of your development group, then they would likely make a good manager. If they came from another product group, it could be disastrous. For example, there's nothing more annoying than someone offering unqualified technical solutions that they encountered in their former world that don't apply to yours...
In smaller shops, IT Managers absolutely have to have the technical knowledge because without it stuff won't get done - small IT Manager are expected to help carry the workload whilst mentoring the people under them. Even if your not in IT management, having some technical knowledge is good to keep the IT Manager in check - I've seen IT Managers who couldn't configure a RAID array, but they knew the lingo well enough to keep the business at arms length and slowly spiral the department into the toilet.
Who says that? Some people say that if you shove your fingers up your nose and blow, you'll increase your IQ. Some people say
Can we just stop with the "some people say
If you're a tech manager and you lack the technical knowledge, how will you be able to determine which approach is viable or even realistic?
And don't tell me that you'd rely upon your staff. How do you know if your staff is any more technically proficient than you are? What happens when two people on your staff have contradicting approaches to a situation? Do you just flip a coin? Or do you go with the one that's been kissing your ass the best in the past week?
If you're a manager, it means that you have the responsibility to understand BOTH aspects. The technology and the business. That's why you're paid more. That's why you were hired.
If you can't handle both, then turn the job over to someone who can and find yourself a job more appropriate to your skill set.
Do we really need another article on this when Dilbert cartoons have been around for so long?
I have worked for both types of Mgrs: Tech Mgrs and Mgrs of Tech. Tbe second tend to better because they stay out of development and allow their staffs to do the work. A Tech Mgr beleives they are right and will commit to schedules that generally not reasonable nor possible.
I remember hearing this story from some senior engineers I worked with about 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure that it's true.
They were all working hard down at Cape Canaveral getting ready to launch a satellite (an old HS-376). The boss came by and asked how things were going and one of the guys said that they were stuck on a problem and needed some parts. The boss eagerly got involved because this was something that he knew he could handle. They sent him to Radio Shack (Titusville) and had him ask for some polarized resistors. He took it in stride and did not get too upset when he came back (red faced) without them. It must have been very humbling for him.
JSL
Is it nice to be able to flim-flam the boss once in a while?
I'm sorry, but the fact that anyone would even consider this paints a very sad picture of society.
If my manager doesn't know the technology that I'm using, he will inevitably agree to something that cannot be done (either impossible or not feasible). Haven't we all had bosses come down and dish out a nearly impossible task that sounds simple when he explains it, but really isn't? When that happens, a few things can happen: a) you get stuck doing it anyway, putting other projects behind schedule b) you fail to do it and look bad (and your boss is insulated from it: "I thought he could do it!") or worse.
I don't expect my bosses to know how to program Python, but they at least have to know what the technology is, how it works, and preferably at least how to read/interpret it.
Of course, in smaller teams, your manager is probably coding with you. Not every group can have a hands-off manager. However, if this is the case, the manager does need to ensure his role is maintained as manager, and not simply a developer. Managers need to insulate their team from stupid ideas, demands, and pet projects from higher levels of management.
Best of all, a manager that really does know the underlying technology will protect his job better. He might not have to program, but he could if he wanted to. Then he is telling the truth when he tells a manager that the "Project was possible, we just didn't have the talent for it."
Ideally managers should be very blunt, too, but that's just a personal preference. Where I work now, for instance, the managers are all-but-silent except during your yearly review. They then present a binder (not just a folder...) of your performance through the year. You may have sucked for 8 months, but they won't tell you til that review, and by then it is probably too late. I'd rather know that I suck sooner than later. Tech-savy managers could make that happen easier.
Incompetent managers can cause dilbertesque levels of insanity in technology just as much as anywhere else. I've seen managers so incompetent that they have led multimillion dollar projects straight into the ground through sheer ineptitude.
I recall one 100 million dollar plus project I was brought in on where a manager believed the vendor when they said you didn't need a single desktop technician to migrate tens of thousands of desktops. Needless to say that manager lost their job and the vender was sued for millions.
The manager needs to know enough to know what's needed for the department to do it's job, to know what to ask for it from venders and upper management. I've seen an it manager approve money for expensive inkjets because they like the pictures without leaving any money in the budget to replace a five year old server on it's last legs. I shouldn't have to explain to a manager that tape drives really do cost much and that a failed unit really needs replaced /now/!
Upper Management needs someone that can make that kind of decision correctly, they rely heavily on management's opinions for purchasing. The user base needs someone that isn't going to be snowed by a vendor with a dog and pony show. The techs need someone that knows what tools they need to do their job.
The job of management is to be an abstraction layer that interfaces between workers and upper management. They need to know enough about the job being done by their employees to do that.
I've been managed by non-technical managers and technically-aware managers, and also been a technically-aware manager myself for a little while.
It's a double edged sword. Non-technical managers might not understand the importance of technical details/problems, but technical managers might end up micromanaging. Personally I believe it all comes down to trust (and hence personality). The best managers are those that are technically competent but trust their team to make the correct judgements without the managers input. The worst are managers that are technically competent but want to make every decision for the team. Engineers *need* to have creative input and make decisions in order to be happy in their roles. Non-technical managers are in-between - they are forced to trust their team, but might not understand the pros and cons of important technical decisions.
Like it or not, those "difficult to quantise" aspects of running a technical project (such as personality) can make or break it. Surviving as a techie manager depends 100% on your personality. Put your trust in your team.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I'll stand up. I have a masters in computer science. I read slashdot. I'm a manager. I'd say it helps me a lot in my daily work to have the same mindset as the developers and architects I manage. Of course, most of my guys could out-code me any day of the week. Luckily, it's not a competition. I'm glad their java-fu is better than mine. I use my background knowledge of developing to ask the right questions and find the right answers, based on their skills.
By being technically informed while managing people and projects, no one can blow smoke up my skirt. I can tell the difference between a lame excuse for a delay and a legitimate reason why something can't be done. That ability is priceless.
If your people blows smoke up your ass then you need to work on your management skills. Regardless that you can detect their lame excuses - if they feel the need to give a lame excuse then it's not only them that's doing a poor job - you are as well.
On the other hand, I've met a lot of techies that don't understand that trust is earned, and respect easily lost.
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
You've heard the expression about people "being promoted to the level of their own incompetence"?
Yes indeed, "The Peter Principle", from Dr. Laurence J. Peter's 1968 book of the same name. Technically, this has nothing to do with some managers being dicks but in practice it does seem that way.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Every time I see one of these management articles/questions on Slashdot, I wonder from which perspective many posters are commenting. If each poster was tagged "have been in management" or "have never been in management", I think that would make for very interesting reading...
Disclaimer: have been in management (goodbye karma)
I was brought in by a small web design and development company to refine their methodology and process while increasing the overall quality of the work. The owner is essentially a sales person and has no knowledge of the technology beyond (often false) sales sound bites. This has completely undermined almost all my work as the owner makes commitments to clients that are unrealistic given the scope and budget of a given project and as a result client expectations are consistently unmet.
I believe anyone who is in a position to discuss a project with the client should, at a minimum, know the technology to the point where they have a realistic understanding of the cost and time frame of a project and changes to that project.
Now because of the difficulties my company is facing the owner is clamoring to begin using and purchasing templates, outsourcing more of our coding overseas, spending less time understanding what the clients want and beginning production almost immediately. Because he has no understanding of the technology I have had a difficult time convincing him of the value of slowing down the process, understanding client expectations before production, and coding with standards from the ground up.
A personal example of how a lack of technical knowledge can kill a project: the owner oversaw the outsourcing and development of a application using SQL Server 2005 that was to be hosted on one of our shared servers despite that we run 2000 and do not have any 2005 licenses, oops.
A Technical Manager, such as a project manager, must know a lot about technology and use it actively in practice, otherwise they are just wasting the programmers's time by asking stupid questions and giving bad directions. A General Manager in an IT business need not have much grasp of technical matters except excellent appreciation of the concepts involved (e.g. they ought to know about information systems), but I would still recommend some weekend coding even to a general manager, especially if they participate in hiring decisions.
I personally am a holder of a BSc(Hons) in Computer Science and I am now studying towards an MSc in Management, while I work as an Analyst Programmer on European Union projects and contribute to open-source. It's not all bad: Techies can certainly become good managers if they try, but I guess it all depends on why one decided to go to business school.
Obviously, Yes! However, how many techies have the necessary organisation and human skill to climb up the corporate ladder?
The manager should be sufficiently aware of the organization's culture to know that ahead of time.
It isn't necessary for him to do any of the actual coding. But he needs to be able to explain to the other managers why, with the current people / money / time / equipment / deadlines / other projects, the IT team will not be able to hit the deadline of the new project.
Then it gets into negotiating with the other managers for more people / money / equipment
The manager's job is to understand the business and the technology sufficiently well that he is able to communicate the business's IT requirements to the coders and provide them with the resources necessary to achieve those requirements in the time allocated.
It's a simple definition, but it's been useful for me. It also allows you to see where the "bad" managers have problems.
#1. They don't understand the business and the team gets stress for delivering tech that isn't appropriate.
#2. They don't understand the tech and over-promise what can be delivered.
#3. They don't understand the business or the tech.
#4. They don't communicate the requirements to the coders.
#5. They don't provide the resources the coders need.
etc.
It's difficult to fail if your manager is competent at each of those steps. But not impossible. There can still be personal issues that cause conflicts/problems.
But the chance of failure goes up dramatically with each step that the manager fails.
I have 2 HUGE problems as a manager who was a tech.
.33 women!) too often.
1) I side with my "guys" (who are
2) I have a nagging feeling I could "do that better" than they're doing it.
Sounds fun, or funny but it's not. It's a pain in the ass. It literally triples my stress levels.
There is no doubt in my mind that being a Sys Admin was a MUCH easier job.
This
The only problem with a manager that's good at what the workers are doing is if the boss doesn't want to quit doing what he's good at. This is a problem because a manager has no attention to devote to work (being the person who filters useless distractions) and little time (having the full-time managing job and twice as many meetings as anybody else). So, no matter how good a techie the person is, the output is lousy, ill-considered, and never ready.
So the answer is really that a manager can't really be a techie, but a manager should be a former techie.
Also, a manager only needs a good approximation (but it can't be a bad approximation) of skill in the field. There's a level of skill where you can't solve a problem yourself, but you know whether it's fundamentally impossible, impractical, or just difficult, and that's ideal for a manager. (The worst thing is if the manager knows the problem can be solved, but nobody else on the team is good enough to solve it and the manager is too busy.)
Of course there's also the Peter Principle; there are plenty of cases of techies without any management skill at all promoted to management positions on the basis of seniority and great technical skill, such that they don't have the necessary skills for their actual job, are too valuable to let go or demote, and don't have the time to do the work they are better at than anyone else.
A lie in the workplace, much more serious than telling someone that their hair doesn't look silly, is a dangerous place to tread.
The technical savvy or character judgement of your management should not be the factor that determines your integrity.
While it is important to have a manager that can "read" people, agreed, it is equally important to have technical people that you can trust. A manager, while he should be a good read of people, is there more so to be a leader and manage the direction of the company, and make sure his employees are in a position to work toward that. The ability to read a lie is important when it comes to negotiating contracts, dealing with purchasing, and speaking with customers; having solid contract-writers and lawyers are insurance in case that ability lapses. Exposing the lies of his employees should not be a skill that a manager must regularly exercise, but I admit that is only in an ideal world. Given this is not an ideal world, and given that the Slashdot poster of the article framed this in context of the collective Slashdot community, I will approach this more as advice for those who bridged their hands and got a knowing grin when they read that last line, and for those new managers who are dealing with folks who might be prone to doing this.
A worker who is willing to lie in order to have their own pursuits usually has questionable ethics (or has a really, really poor manager who they really cannot be honest with.) In your particular situation, that a person new to the company would falsely pinpoint another member of the team as holding up production (even if that other individual had a good, excused reason to do so), should be a red flag. (And further, that people new to a company commonly find it acceptable to "get out of Dodge" instead of putting in the necessary time when he is ultimately on a trial and there to prove that hiring him was a good decision, although certainly not a fireable offense, is a topic for another time.)
Although not too serious if the project really could wait, and it is true that everyone makes mistakes on occasion that may be forgiven, but he made the dangerous first step down a bad road of not being trustworthy and furthermore toward becoming a liability. An honest worker shouldn't dishonestly leverage other workers' situations, especially someone more junior to themselves, in order for them to achieve their own pursuits. Lying to your face, whether you have the ability to determine those lies or not, was even more offensive. That was disrespectful of you and to the junior gentleman. You are fortunate in that, considering he is still with you, he appears to have just made a mistake in judgment and has probably come to be a reliable worker. Everyone makes a mistake now and again, but there are consequences to those mistakes. He is fortunate that you are a good enough manager to understand that personal fulfillment is important, and will let him off to see his girlfriend, and that you would give him another chance, as you should have; perhaps he came from a company where this wasn't true, where one "has" to lie in order to not see the company die, and thus that was his reasoning for lying to your face.
I know it doesn't seem so this day in age where lies here and there seem to be the norm, but in the case of an engineer (which I suspect many people here on Slashdot are), integrity is often all that he has to give confidence to his customer or boss that he can competently complete the job, and that the risk in giving him a sum of money and time in which to do a job is worth it.
If you become someone who is known to lie for their own purposes, then you can't be surprised when your input means diddley squat to the people making the decisions. Or when you're jobless.
And when you have lied until your management are in the ninth circle of cluelessness, you cannot wonder why decisions that make absolutely no sense are being made, and some serious consequences (a complete wipe of the technical st
A one word point on whether having managers with a technical background in a technology company is superior - Google
- The CEO of the national rail system, Hartmut Mehdorn, is a Mechanical Engineer.
- famously, Ron Sommer, the former CEO of Deutsche Telekom (think T-Mobile in the states) is a very gifted Mathematician.
- Dieter Zetsche, the CEO of Daimler Chrysler has a PhD in Engineering (hence "Dr. Z.").
- Ferdinan Piech, the head of Volkswagen, studied mechanical engineering in Zurich and is a grandson of the archetype of the German Engineer, Ferdinand Porsche (who, before anyone corrects me, was, arguably, Czech, Austrian or German).
- Speaking of which, the CEO of Porsche, Wendelin Wiedeking has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.
The list continues for companies like the chemistry and pharma giant BASF (Jürgen Hambrecht, a chemist), SAP (all its founders, Hasso Plattner, Hans-Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira and Dietmar Hopp are either Physicists or Mathematicians), ThyssenKrupp (Ekkehard Schulz, a mining engineer), Robert Bosch Inc. (Hermann Scholl, an electrical engineer) and so on. Bear in mind we're not talking about people who directed their companies as startups like Microsoft or Apple, but CEOs of companies who already where global players before they joined (or were even born).So, although these people probably qualify more as "leaders" than as managers, it is obviously possible to be a good techie and run a big company at the same time.
Would a bank hire a manager that worked at a shipping company that has never even had a bank account in his life? Why is it that managers in every field except technology expect that the manager is minimally competent in the part that they are managing? I have worked in a public company where the EVP in charge of IT, HR and PR had never had or used a computer in his life. Every expense over something trivial like $5000 had to be approved by someone that was proven to not know what any of it was and usually didn't even know what it was supposed to do. This is a man that had all his emails printed for him to read and he dictated them to a secretary that sent them in his name.
It makes sense for managers to come to IT the way they come to most other professions. You are competent in the basics of the profession, and then you move up to supervisory positions, work well at that, then become a manager. I understand that it is sometimes harder for that to happen in IT because the people drawn to the IT profession are not necessarily heavy in the traits that are valued in managers, but it is still a much better proposition than taking someone who has never owned or used a computer in his life and putting him in charge of IT for a company. I'd like to say that was unusual, but almost every large company I've worked for has had a level at the VP level that had never done anything on a computer other than word processing, or if they were an expert, maybe Power Point.
The question isn't whether a manager can be a techie and survive, the question is why can so many be non-technical and survive, when every other profession has a massive affinity for managers being competent workers in what they manage?
Learn to love Alaska
Let's talk about the CEO for a minute. If you're saying that the CEO needs to have tech skills "in order to tell the difference betwen fiction and reality," then you are saying that no techie or middle manager below the CEO can be trusted to provide accurate information. If this is the case, then the CEO needs to re-think his staffing plan. Also, why is this limited to tech? Does the CEO also need to have a detailed understanding of marketing, accounting, human resources, law, etc., in order to avoid being lied to by those departments as well?
So: Direct supervisors of tech staff should have tech skills, but at some level above them in the organization, tech skills give way in importance to management and business skills.
This leads to question #2: What do you mean by survive? No doubt an ambitious manager would like to see a clear promotion path all the way up to the CEO level. I don't think tech skills are a liability to achieving this, but once you cross the threshold from supervisory to executive management, those tech skills are not worth much any more. If you have to spend a lot of energy maintaining the techie side of your brain, you are presumably detracting from the amount of time you can spend polishing your executive skills. And this makes you less promotable than someone without this distraction.
So: Can you survive? Yes, you can do very well as a supervisor of techies, but insisting on a robust set of tech skills may cost you as an executive.
-Graham
A senior manager who wants a genuine estimate would ask the technical lead for it, but large consultancies often don't care about the team leaders reality. More often than not their budgets are designed to spend $X in time 'T' with 'P' people to get to stage 'S'. From this they expect to make back $X + $X1, similar financial practices are used to build things as diverse as houses and battleships.
With large consultancies (or incestous corporate "partnerships") your project is often part of a multi-million dollar contract that basically says "we will look after your IT needs for five years in return for skimming the cream from your expenditure", for the deal to work the money MUST be spent in such a way that it lasts five years. From memory, the ideal "estimate" for a project comes in at -5% to +15% of the "real cost", ouside of that range too often and the PM is out of that nice corner office. This leads to the bizzare situations I have witnessed where one executive gets into deep shit for saving millions in costs and another gets a fat bonus for shuffling account numbers and playing solitaire.
I used quotes for "real costs" since the "real" part is only in the minds of accountants. Even the PM's I have admired would spend a considerable amount of time shuffling account numbers to ensure their projects come within the acceptable range regardless of reality. Without all this accounting bullshit a large chunk of the population could be doing something more usefull, OTOH, without it we wouldn't have built the pyramids in the first place.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Techies do not respect "managers" who are not at least as smart as they are. A manager who knows what questions to ask, and where to drill down, is a valuable asset to the organization and mentor to the team he leads. A manager that could, if need be, sit down at a keyboard, help the team debug, troubleshoot, brainstorm, and even code a problem that the team is struggling with is priceless. The team will follow him to the ends of the earth. As long as the manager isn't on an ego trip. Its about the team. This technical manager, with humility and servant-leadership doubles a team's value for the employer and the personal and professional development of the individuals that comprise it.
Doubt that? I am no "Apple Groupie" (I'm a *nix head), but you need to look no further than Steve Jobs for living proof of its power.
Thanks for listening.
G
My most memorable experience in engineering came upon joining a group of people, all very techie, who were a group of radio amateurs doing what they liked to do - namely - tinkering with RF.
It was a helluva "job", if you can call it that. "Lifestyle" was more the word for me.
It was the kind of thing you couldn't wait to get to the lab. I bought my house really close so I could minimize the time I had to do such nuisance things like eating or sleeping. All my "toys" were at the lab. The house was more like somewhere I went when I had to go to sleep. I would have gladly slept at the lab if there were somewhere to do it. Yeh - true-blue nerd. I was just as addicted to my RF toys as gamers are to games.
I had the best boss imaginable. A wizard of all things. That guy knew everything. But he just had one set of hands and that was a severe limition to him. I'd gladly be his hands if he would just show me how all this stuff worked. He had a really uncanny understanding of how stuff worked. I almost say I had religious experiences just talking to this guy. Its just the way he could explain fields and energy flows in such a graphical nature.
A big corporation bought us out one day.
They brought in their Masters of Business Degree managers, well schooled in the motivational theories and executive management skills, but didn't know much of a damn about how anything worked. Working for them was hell.
I soon found I anxiously awaited going-home time and weekends. I soon found why they called it "work". It wasn't fun anymore. It was hell.
I found myself surrounded by people making far more money than anyone I had ever seen make, yet they were completely ignorant of what we did. Only thing they seemed to care about were schedules and what software and tools we were going to be allowed to use. They set themselves up with altars and the rest of us now had the onus of paying homage to these altars, telling the holy priests of the altar what they wanted to hear, or we would be excommunicated as "not being a team player". The old paradigms of knowing what one was doing did not seem germane anymore. We were just supposed to "point and click". A lot of us had to go. I was financially insecure, so I hung on a bit longer and got laid off.
I see two schools of thought here. Whether one aligns himself with the ability to do or the ability to control.
I guess its like supplying water to a city....are you a pump or a valve?
Companies with an overabundance of creativity may want to throttle it back by hiring people to tell the creative people that they can't use the tools they like.
Newly forming companies may want to open the creativity spigots wide open and clear our all obstructions to generate the most possible throughput.
Its a cycle seen in all of nature - things get old, and are replaced with new things. Millions of seedlings are nourished by the rot of one big dead tree.
I am quite aware that quite a few very innovative companies arose from our "corpse".
I am of the belief that in younger growing companies, the manager is a mentor, that can do everything, yet due to time constraints, has to bring in more hands to do the work, and he personally mentors them.
In larger, more mature companies, which do not need the growth, the manager does not need to know what the people do. By now, its a commodity thing, he just has to look at numbers. Who can make the cheapest aspirin...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
But I have worked for about 30 years in the biz. I've been the programmer, the manager, the executive, and I'm back to being something of a programmer and a manager and an architect.
It boggles me that so many of us describe managers as 'the other'. I am just a guy who was kinda good at the work, and kinda good at getting along with people, and kinda good at taking the lead when something needed doing. In a lot of cases, my having some skill in the biz caused projects to move much more expeditiously, because the doers didn't need to take 2 hours and 45 powerpoint slides to convince me that we needed a certain server configuration. My team members have, to my knowledge, usually regarded this as a Good Thing, as it shortened their day and simplified their lives.
Why would you NOT want a manager that can understand what you are trying to talk about? How could that make your life better? The examples discussed above, of micromanaging, are not criticisms of technical expretise, they are criticisms of micro managers. Of course it's better to have a tehcnically incompetent micro-managing boss (so you can frooze them), but that begs the question of whether a technically knowledgable -competent- boss is worse than a technically ignorant -competent- boss. Having had both, I will modestly suggest that a career is easier and more fun, when you and your team can talk on the same terms. Dontcha think Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds would be more satisfying to have as bosses than Jack Welch or (shudder) Oprah?
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Considering the vastness of our collective ignorance, and the smaller - but even more frightening - ignorance of people in key positions about the work for which they are responsible, it is absurd to argue that managers should lack domain expertise.
It seems obvious to me that a manager who understands what his people are doing will be more successful. BUT there are a few provisos that might blur the issue:
1. A "techie" manager must be able to resist the temptation to get sucked into micromanaging or - worse still - trying to compete with his own team. Instead, he should be mature enough to let people learn and grow, even if they must make mistakes in the process (and no one learns without a few mistakes).
2. As others have noted, not even the most gifted and expert techie knows it all. The manager must realise that, even in his own field of expertise, other opinions are valid - and sometimes might be better than his own.
3. Unless he is able to stay current (which is unlikely if he is doing his current job properly), a manager must always be careful to allow for the time that has passed since he was an active practitioner. The state of the art ten years ago is apt to be laughably obsolete today, especially in fast-changing fields like IT. (On the other hand, wisdom of the type contained in "The Mythical Man-Month", for instance, is just as relevant as it ever was).
4. A manager needs to be able to switch communication modes when talking to non-techies. Even a CIO will be unsuccessful if the other CxOs are baffled by what they they perceive as his "technical mumbo-jumbo". It is essential to talk each person's own language, stay within their comfort zones, and reason in ways they can appreciate and follow.
5. Even if technical knowledge is very desirable, it is not the most important attribute of a good manager. Leadership, the ability to listen and understand, team building, and sensitivity have to come first. Far better a seasoned, sympathetic manager from a different industry than a stubborn, micro-managing, blinkered techie whose ideas have passed their sell-by date.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The purpose of the PM is to keep the project on track. Any additional knowledge will only slow him down as he tries to "fix" things that should be left to the people in the project originally assigned to do so.
The idea of having a PM is so you can leave the tech people alone doing their thing and not having to worry about scheduling and other non technical work. The best PMs I have worked with were not technically impaired, in fact they were geeks but within the scope of the project they acted as if they did not know a thing about it. This is why they worked out so well, they could talk to the client just fine, but did not get lost whenever talking to one of the programmers for more than 5 minutes.
I also had PMs that had absolutely no technical knowledge, but they understood the goals, had a very good relationship with the client and they listened to us. Project makes it on budget, client is happy, programmers don't hate the project or the PM, the PM still has all of his hair and did not turn into an alcoholic so everyone wins.
The two biggest problems with project managers, something that has not changed in the past 15 years or so:
1. Prima donna customers.
2. Prima donna programmers.
Not much you can do about #1, since these customers usually hold a lot of cash that you want to push your way. As for #2, you will be amazed at how much nicer it is to deal with the PMs if you (I am going to include myself in this one, guilty as charged) bump down the attitude from a 12 (on a ten scale) to maybe a 9.5.
Pedro
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The Insomniac Coder