>I don’t blame non-technical managers for not knowing this stuff. So if you hire an electrician, and he also doesn't know how to do his job and ends up startin

>I don’t blame non-technical managers for not knowing this stuff. So if you hire an electrician, and he also doesn't know how to do his job and ends up starting a fire and burning your house down, do you not blame him either? A manager's job is to manage programmers. If he doesn't understand important principles like, "there's so much variation in programmer productivity that, if you know this guy is really good, it might be worth it to pay him 5x as much as the other guy we're considering", he doesn't know how to do his job effectively. Blame him.