I think we can all agree that bad managers suck and managers who pretend to be technical particularly suck. However it feels the me though like we greatly under

I think we can all agree that bad managers suck and managers who pretend to be technical particularly suck. However it feels the me though like we greatly underestimate the difficulty of being a technical manager and grievously under train them. Google has gone past the one-off personal experiences and studied across lots of teams and projects[1] and being a technical expert wasn't even close to the most important trait. I'd like to see us spend less time proposing "no managers" as current ones aren't good and more time on figuring out how to make them good and give them training and support they need. Most of the ones I know want to be successful and are trying in their own imperfect way. If you think the most important thing is technical prowess just take a look at any academic CS department, run only by super technical professors it is often a case study in anti-patterns. From Google's study on managers reported in nytimes[2] “In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.” [1] https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/managers/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/managers/ [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?smid=pl-share http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?smid=... edit for formatting