Want to get your thoughts on Elon Musk's tweet... Should a software manager of coders also be a great coder themselves?

Yes 100%, at least good enough to know what’s real and what’s bs

A good manager is like a conductor of a symphony. They can’t be a master at every instrument - nor should they! Their job is bring it all together.

Eh. The higher up you get, the less in the weeds you are. Managers in a technical area should understand the tech stack they are working with and know enough to guide the team they’re managing. I don’t think they need to be super proficient coders as that’s spreading yourself thin. But they should be able to dive in and ask technical questions and help the team problem solve.

It’s a spectrum - there’s probably a limited number of folks who are great coders and also great managers. You could have a great coder who is a terrible manager (unorganized, bad at comms).

I agree they should have an understanding of the tools/apps they're responsible for managing, not necessarily experts. They must also have an understanding of management.

This is an "engineering led" view of development. Being a great programmer doesn't make you a domain expert or an understanding of the users. In fact, Alan Cooper wrote the book "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" that demonstrated how relying on engineers rather than Product Managers and UX Designers leads to poor products.

I strongly believe that this is complete bs. Technical skills and management skills are often completely independent.
In my experience having a manager with great management skills and the will to learn the technical part is far better for the team's health than having a manager who is a technical demigod with little to none management inclination.

Ideally you'd want someone great at both. But given the choice I'd much rather have a manager that brings the team together but struggles to follow a technical discussion than an SME with poor people skills.

Maybe some day we'll have business leaders who don't treat every business problem as if it is analogous to the tactics and strategy required to win a violent, lethal war.

I would rather have a genius strategist for a cavalry captain who is a mediocre rider than the other way around.

For a direct manager, I need someone who supports me and deals with the upper management crap. If they aren’t able to do my job technically that’s fine, that’s why myself and my peers are employed.

"Must" all technology managers be technically excellent? Depends on the organization.

I think it's safer to say: "The best technology managers are technically excellent.

(that's certainly been true in my experience)

Boeing used to be an engineer led organization. Then they turned into a bean counter led organization. That's why we have the 737 MAX mess along with some other lower profile stuff.

Some domains need engineers/tech in charge up to a pretty high level. Others don't. The question is where is the point in which one clearly becomes more advantageous than the other or what level of mix you want.

If a manager doesn't understand what those that report to him are building, he NEEDS to start figuring it out. That should be one of the most important duties. On the other hand, if an engineer becomes a manager, he needs to start figuring out how management works, what upper levels expect from him and how to start giving things to them in the way they want, in their vocabulary and on their terms.

Not every tech manager can make that transition and not every regular manager will be able to figure out the tech enough to do the job competently. So, choose carefully.

The best engineers I know would terrify me as managers. They’re not the same skillet. But when management is clueless that’s when you get bureaucratic processes that make no sense. There’s a happy medium there.

My organization is working through a re-structure in the opposite direction.

The reason being is that we have a very wide area of technologies under our per-view (from embedded, industrial, multiple flavors of apps, web api, etc) which leaves us a very short candidate list of people technically excellent across the entire spectrum.

However, we ARE looking at people who can technically grasp the operations without their eyes glazing over, a hunger to learn (as always) and have great communication and organizational skills. These aren’t traits that 20 year Principle Engineers develop with maturity.. if anything, we’ve found they can regress if allowed.

For one of our groups we’ve already found that a great hire was the 3 yr old SW engineer who just graduated and learned that he doesn’t really want to write code but knows how to apply separation of concerns in a business fashion to give better scalability and definition of our team structures.

I strongly believe we should all start off life with an emerald mine.

Completely agree. You can teach management on the job, but not technical expertise and skill. People need to be intimately aware of what they are managing.

💯 agree, always know how to code or whatever job your direct reports do if at all possible. Make sure you keep one deep skill.

I think the tweet refers to Engineering managers and not Product managers. Atleast that's how I interpreted it and I think it is true. Engineering managers need to have a better understanding of what their team members need to do to succeed in their roles. That also means they themselves need to be good enough to guide them to build products using the best industry practices which warrants experience working on such tools and technologies. You cannot have an entire product development team solely dependent on each other for technical decisions and development.

Anyone has the aptitude to be a great manager or a poor one. I've seen technically brilliant managers that have miserable low performing teams and technically aware managers with fantastic skills that run high performing teams building outstanding products. It is not a zero sum game. Pretty sure Musk doesn't personally mine his own lithium either yet he is dependent on it.

Those who can do. Those who can't, manage.

This debate never stops and there is no good answer.