> We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't wo

> We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't work at all. > They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. > You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they want to be a manager, because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them. > -- Steve Jobs YMMV, but best managers I worked under were extremely competent programmers and had an eye for the big-picture stuff. They knew when to intervene and when to leave engineers to their own devices. It's when managers start to think their job is to create specs, run & enforce sprint boards, and create processes upon processes, that working under becomes a torture. So, yes, I would say 'barely managing' is a feature, not a bug.