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by kemiller2002 2066 days ago
At my last job I had an interesting (nice) experience. My boss wasn't an engineer, he was a project manager, but that didn't hinder him. I think what made him successful was that he cared. He'd say over and over, "I'm not a developer, I need help understanding." We would sit in a meeting and walk through problems. He was very calm and patient and acted genuinely interested in what the problem was. He would ask questions about what he didn't understand, and trust us on the things that we would say. It was a great experience. When we said we had a problem, he tried to understand and relay that to the necessary people. When he couldn't we'd accompany him to explain the details.
3 comments
nicoburns 2066 days ago
Yeah, I've definitely worked with non-engineers (project managers, designers, QA, etc) who are more than capable of understanding technical issues even if they don't get the details. They're usually great people to work with, and I try to extend the same courtesy to other parts of the business that I work with.
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rurp 2066 days ago
My current manager is a lot like this. He has never written a line of code but is surprisingly good at scoping work and understanding how important various tasks are. I think that any manager who is smart, cares about the work, and has good discussions with their engineers can develop a solid understanding of software projects.

There's no magic to it but, sadly, that combination of qualities is a lot less common than I would like.

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wolfgang000 2065 days ago
My current and former manager are exactly like this, except that both of them do know SQL, really great guys that try their best to help guide the project.

As a little anecdote, my first boss was a technical manager with many years of experience in programming but unfortunately not very good managerial skills. The biggest problem was that he had a clear image of the big picture but when we try to explain to him that "No, we can't do X because Y" then he said, "what are you talking about? Of course, we can It's a simple queue/query/function call", and he would not listen until we show and explain him the code or he tried to do it himself.

It's definitely better to have an empathic and cooperative manager even if he or she lags the technical knowledge

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