This is a great point—management really is its own skill. However, I think it’s also important that managers be skilled in the specialty that they oversee, espe

This is a great point—management really is its own skill. However, I think it’s also important that managers be skilled in the specialty that they oversee, especially if it is complex work like software development. I think that an excellent manager with no knowledge of software development (aside from attending an “agile summit” or something) would struggle to effectively manage a team of developers. That’s what makes software development management so hard: to be good at it, you have to be a good manager and a decent developer, which are completely orthogonal skills.