[justinclift]

  As you advance in any career, jobs become more and more
  similar. There is a huge difference between a janitor, a
  dentist and a marketer, but the manager overseeing the
  janitors, dentists and marketers have a lot more in common.
  The VPs in charge of the managers of janitors, dentists and
  marketers have even more in common.

This is the kind of thought process that leads to incompetent leadership of technical people, by non-technical ones, with disastrous consequences.

[ID1452319]

Why do you say that? The best manager I've ever had came from a non-technical background. She was good because she knew how to manage people. Not technical people, just people.

On the other hand the worst manager I've ever had came from a technical background.

I have no reason to believe that my best manager could successfully manage a team of janitors, dentists, marketers or software developers.

[Traster]

There is people management, and then there is management. A good people manager could manager the janitors as well as the marketers, but they aren't going to have the expertise to be able to actually put together a vision for what a team should be doing. That comes from domain expertise, not from people management skills. People managers are very good at lower level organisational roles because you don't need to set vision, but beyond relatively small management roles the key skill is expertise -because everyone already has people skills at that point. Employing good people managers to be senior leaders results in stagnant companies.

[justinclift]

Interesting. I'm come across several non-technical managers making extraordinarily bad decisions - major company direction level - even when very directly told "Do Not Do This, It's not feasible" by their technical staff.

It's never gone well. :(

[jgalt212]

There's managing people and deciding deciding strategy.