Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

However the timeline I've experienced is different:

* You have a great engineer or lead who knows the project inside and out

* They are promoted to management.

* They still know the project inside and out plus were recently coding so they dictate how things are done technically. It works great.

* They get put on a new project which they don't know inside and out.

* They dictate how things should be done technically because it worked for them in the past successfully. It works horribly.

IMO, a manager should understand the complexity of the work of his employee at an approx. ball park level.

I recognize the feeling when tasked with bringing a new developer up-to-speed. They don’t know anything about our environment and the brilliant decisions that led us to our utopian way of working. They ask an honest question and I, having forgotten the ingredients, brush off the question because I don’t have time to explain. Welcome to the team noob.

I also recognize the challenge when speaking with practically every CEO, COO, EVP, VP, and Director in a mid-sized organization. And the challenge can grow exponentially when the business involved views technology as an expense. Somewhere in the building there are a number of idiots who think a pointer is a device used for whiteboard presentations. How is this company profitable?

But solace comes when I realize the issue is my own.

Technical expertise is not the only expertise required by a company. It is highly likely that your organization has executives that don’t need to understand the productivity differences between vim and emacs. Imagine how frustrating it would be when attempting to ensure the company has enough funding for the next four quarters and you can’t get a single developer in the world to provide a reasonable estimate that doesn’t have a sixty-percent margin of error. I dare you to argue the benefits of a scrum master.

Your manager is just as anxious about having to talk to you. Give them a break and help them do their job. They’ll appreciate it and may care to understand your concerns moving forward. Who knows, they may be willing to help you do your job better (as if that's possible). Communication will be less frustrating when you stop viewing others as inferior. They feel the hostility.

The most successful amongst us are those that communicate by simplifying complex subjects down to an intelligible analogy. They sell. The world rewards those who sell. Just find another way sell your complexity, patiently, and with a touch of empathy. The rewards will follow.

However, and especially at scale, there is a humanistic factor in management that having technical background alone can't fix. How do you manage deadlines? How do you deal with engineers who over-engineer a feature and go down that deep technical rabbit hole, with no "done date" in sight? How do you deal with people having to take a sabbatical but having an important project deadline around the corner? Heck, I'd argue engineers like myself are pretty bad at this and still constantly learning. Don't forget that expectation vs reality distortion is real. Great managers are essentially brokers to keep expectation and reality in check.