[therein]

> "We don't let managers code where I work."

That leads exactly to the situation you described below.

> "...ended up with managers who slowly lost their technical skills and essentially fossilized, and couldn't make rational tech decisions"

I recently left my job at a respected social network over my new manager lacking the proper technical skills yet not accepting more reasonable solutions.

Case in point: imagine you have an API endpoint you normally hit with your service, periodically. We make a GET request to this endpoint but it also supports POST. The parameter sent is q=<some_long_string>.

It comes to my attention that this long string can get over 1MB long, at which point it causes issues with our service.

I bring up in a meeting that we should just POST to this endpoint instead of doing GET at all times because the data could be larger than 1MB at times. Makes sense, right? Well, my manager without the proper technical awareness basically pushed for us to check if the query is larger than 1MB and POST if and only if it is larger than 1MB.

I gave my two weeks a week after that and made it very clear to the upper management that this manager was the reason I was leaving and I felt like I was being stifled by having a manager like this.

[ilovecaching]

But your manager was doing what I said he shouldn't do which is butt in on technical decisions. You should have talked to your skip and your team mates about your manager stepping over the boundary. You should have also told your manager you wanted to switch teams. There are plenty of other managers who don't work like that.

[jiveturkey]

While that would satisfy the immediate problem of not having to personally work for such a manager, it doesn't solve the problem that the company has such managers.

Better to leave.

[ilovecaching]

As long as the company has clearly defined the roles in the way I've described there is no reason to leave. There will always be outliers who are not working as intended. That's human nature for you. The real solution is to try and help those people understand their role better, and if that fails, then get rid of them.

[GordonS]

There is at least one bad egg almost anywhere.

I mean no disrespect, but if you quit every time you have to work with a bad/obnoxious/egotistical/incompetent/delusional manager (or project manager), you'll never remain long in one job.

[jiveturkey]

yes, to you and the other sibling, i didn't mean one bad apple ruins the bunch. i assumed reasonableness of the GP in that he didn't experience once bad interaction and bail, and that he left out all those details for the sake of brevity. because you know, most people are (by definition) reasonable.

i thought it would have been too much to qualify my remarks but i see i should have.

i only meant, if this is the norm for a company, leave post haste.

thank you for challenging my comment, it was well deserved.

[spookthesunset]

As others have said, a good manager shouldn't have got involved at all with this discussion beyond "figure it out!". Technical decisions aren't their job anymore. They are there to solve people and organizational problems now--not technical problems.