FWIW, my favorite IT managers have been ones who, for example: > That's one principle I try to follow - leave estimates to the ones doing the actual work. And

FWIW, my favorite IT managers have been ones who, for example: > That's one principle I try to follow - leave estimates to the ones doing the actual work. And... > In other words - I try to help them understand what the end goal/needs looks like, and I leave it to them to create the architecture and estimate the workload. So it sounds like you're on the right track. One last detail, which may or may not be relevant for your case: managers who can isolate us developers from being directly pestered by other management or sales/marketing folks have always been among my favorites. That is: a manager who insist that other teams do not directly come ask that manager's devs to take on tasks, instead filtering all such requests through the devs' manager. That's not nearly as common as i'd like to hope it is, and the managers who do that well have always had my loyalty for doing so. i've been in several teams where the Marketing Folks were used to just walking to to the devs and "asking" them to take on specific tasks, completely bypassing the chain of command. Many devs aren't as stubborn as i am and will accept such tasks rather than complain about it. Great managers help ensure that that sort of violation doesn't happen more than once.