As long as the manager is not the one making technical decision, then there's nothing wrong with a non-technical manager. That's why you need IC tracks with Pr

As long as the manager is not the one making technical decision, then there's nothing wrong with a non-technical manager. That's why you need IC tracks with Principal and above engineers, so that the person that _knows_ stuff is in charge of technical decision and the manager can be in charge of people problems / communications / strategy / scheduling, none of which strong technical people are particularly known to be good at. Think about this, what good does having a SVP of a big company be an engineer that hasn't coded a line of code in 20+ years? These people probably don't even remember what it means to be a programmer. I would much rather have a manager that is good at being a manager and doesn't know anything about coding, rather than a mediocre manager that also knows coding but they are not in the loop and think they knows better than me.