[anaolykarpov]

I'm a Perl dev and at my previous job my PM was an ex java dev, while the department manager didn't even had technical background (he was an economist). This meant that the management had to completely trust us regarding the tech part of the project (estimations, technical solutions, overcoming obstacles, etc) while we trusted them with regards to the non technical issues of the project - mainly the non tech interactions with the customer. The relationship between developers and managers was one of collegiality instead of a boss-subalterns one where everybody knew their role. They were our facilitators and enablers, not our bosses, while we were doing our best to put them in the best position possible to the client.

[tushar-r]

What you said about the PM and Dept. Manager, reminded me of this article by Rands:

http://randsinrepose.com/archives/entropy-crushers/

== A good project manager is one who elegantly and deftly handles information. They know what structured meetings need to exist to gather information; they artfully understand how to gather additional essential information in the hallways; and they instinctively manage to move that gathered information to the right people and the right teams at the right time.

There are humans who are really good at this. They thrive on it. Engineers have difficulty believing this – it’s the same issue they have with managers. They see these strange humans focusing furiously and scurrying hither and yon and they wonder, “What are they actually building?” They’re right. Project managers don’t write code, they don’t test the use cases, and they’re not designing the interface. You know what a good project manager does? They are chaos destroying machines, and each new person you bring onto your team, each dependency you create, adds hard to measure entropy to your team. A good project manager thrives on measuring, controlling, and crushing entropy. ==

[vegabook]

Domain experts who have no clue about tech are doomed. They are still very numerous in business, treating the tech people as support staff, rather than strategic staff. Generally sprinkling tech in a haphazard way on top of an existing organization, instead of reinventing it. This is exactly why disruption has been so successful in so many industries. It's been, generally, just a case of swapping the hierarchy around in favour of tech. That said, I am of the opinion that tech experts who have no specialization in a specific domain, are also increasingly doomed. Being an awesome coder, by itself, is no longer enough because there is so much global competition in a skill which has low barriers to entry for millions of talented people. You have to operate at the nexus of tech and domain and therefore know both really well.