* Most management responsibilities have nothing to do with technical matters. A manager should serve the developers, not order them around.* Exactly. That's wh

* Most management responsibilities have nothing to do with technical matters. A manager should serve the developers, not order them around.* Exactly. That's what good management does: insulate the programmers from as much nonsense that is possible. A good manager has some grasp of the field so that he can block at least the most outrageous feature requests from the devs or at least delay asking about them until a weekly meeting or something. If the devs have problem, the manager will drive the issues through the cogs and clogs of the organization and bureaucracy instead of using valuable developer time to track those issues. An anecdote: I have had travelling arranged by a competent office manager and a company-wide travel reservation and approval system. Guess which saved so much time from everyone, sending an email to the office manager "I need to fly to X next Tuesday, my boss on Cc: with this" and afterwards dropping a stack of receipts back to her for filing reimbursements, or a dozen people trying to figure out what's the best way through the travel system without sacrificing too much work time on that and still ending up scanning individual receipts for uploading to the system.