As an engineer, I've had both a fantastic people manager, and a fantastic project manager. They were godsends. They were also abnormally engaged and empathetic.

As an engineer, I've had both a fantastic people manager, and a fantastic project manager. They were godsends. They were also abnormally engaged and empathetic. They both sweated the technical details of the project we were working on and used that understanding to operate as very effective negotiators and shit umbrellas. As a result we were clear to move forward very quickly on multiple fronts and ended up having the capacity to pick up a whole bunch of slack from peer teams that had marooned themselves. Good ones have tremendous amounts of value to contribute. Bad ones are the productivity equivalent of a ball-and-chain. Unfortunately, the cross-over point into net positive seems to be located noticeably higher than mean competence.