[mancerayder]

How do you stay current on tech when you're doing mostly crap work and umbrella-ing and project managing, and your people are doing all the juicy innovative stuff?

That's my current struggle. I'm leaning on doing work for myself on the weekend and evenings, which will be brutal.

[sateesh]

I am not an manager, and this is something that puzzles me too. For an engineer to respect his manager, you expect the manager to be technically competent and in tune with recent technological developments. But as a manger you are most likely to be bit removed from technological changes given that most of the time is spent in meetings, talking, keeping people engaged etc. A few things I can think of but I don't know how effective they could be:

  * keep reading technical books, well-known/reputed engineering blogs with the intent of not understanding everything but atlas to get a gist of the technology changes

  * be engaged and attend some of the technical discussion meetings (not as an enforcer of some decision) but mostly as a keen observer.