I remember working for a gent years ago, who was stressed out that my output was so low

> I remember working for a gent years ago, who was stressed out that my output was so low. He declared "I started this business in my living room let me show you I can do any job in this building" > He came to my workspace, where I had 20 servers stacked on my workbench. He looked at them. Attached a single power cord. And then wandered off telling me he could definitely do the work if he wanted to. Frankly, all this anecdote tells me is "don't behave like a condescending asshole". If he'd said the same thing but then managed to do some non-trivial aspect of your job for a few minutes, I think that would still have been a bad tactic. It's just as possible to have humility about skills you lack, and to lack humility about skills you've maintained.

I don’t know man. Can Bezos code? Can he operate a forklift? Would he still even recognize Powerpoint if you opened it for him? At certain points things need to be let go of if you want to keep growing. Some managers might keep technical skills sharp, but I’m not sure they’re much better managers for it.

> I cant work for someone who doesn't understand what I do. But you already do. Unless you're working for a tiny startup, your CEO or the Board probably doesn't understand the specifics of your code. You can't run a large company by making every person super-involved in every detail. You have layers of abstraction that make it possible to reason about an org of hundreds or thousands of employees. The Board trusts the CTO to oversee technology. Your CTO trusts your director / VP / whatever to run a large chunk of it. That person delegates a smaller part of running the company to your boss. The whole point of each layer is to abstract away some of the underlying messiness. They exercise professional judgment for day-to-day operations and provide a clean interface that provides health signals, requests resources as needed, etc. And I think what many folks miss is that it doesn't stop with t…

> I cant work for someone who doesn't understand what I do. Someone can understand what you do without being able to do it.

> I cant work for someone who doesn't understand what I do. Managers are responsible for maximizing what people they work with can achieve. This does not require them to be able to do what their team can do. > I dont think a manager of software engineers needs to code the application he manages, but he should be continually coding something to remain sharp. A counter to this is; a manager of software engineers needs to remove roadblocks impeding the success of the team. Good managers enable their coworkers, micromanagers weigh in on or perform commits.

I guess I don't get what's objectionable about working for someone who doesn't understand how you do what you do. Isn't what matters being appreciated? I certainly can't work for someone who doesn't value what I do, but I can care less whether they actually understand how I do it.

>>An unused sword rusts in its sheathe. >>I dont think a manager of software engineers needs to code the application he manages, but he should be continually coding something to remain sharp. I'd even go to the extreme of saying the coding skills/brains fade by inverse cube law. Skill =~ 1/t^3 (t = time since last practiced the skill). Musicians are known to say something along similar lines, like as little as a day of missed practice and they can feel it. I used to be quite good at calculus as a teenager, and today I could look at the easiest problems there are and go blank. Only a faint echo of those days remains. I have long suspected that Doctors suffer similar decline in ability as years go by from Medical school, and you can be sure in as little 2 - 5 years, most managers would struggle to imagine what writing code could look like.

If your boss can do your job, one of you is redundant. Managers of engineers should be the interface to the business and other units within the organization. That's a big enough job without requiring coding skills on top of it.