[lunias]

This sounds like a generalization to me.

During my time writing software professionally I've had good, bad, and neutral managers.

I've found most of my good managers at companies that produce software as a product. These managers were technically trained and rose to their management roles through working as engineers at other companies. In two cases these managers were actually the CTO.

Most of my bad managers have been at companies that rely on software to facilitate their business, but do not consider software to be their business. These managers knew little about software and our teams were usually bloated by non-technical roles and often unproductive. Every idea ultimately had to be passed through engineers for validation / refinement and engineering became a very constrained resource.

Neutral management is where I would place most of my managers. They don't really aid in or detract from my productivity. They're there and doing things (even if those things are not always visible to me). They demonstrate enough value to dispell the feelings of: "If you weren't here then we could hire another engineer to actually work on this problem".

That said, you are 100% correct that if I didn't think about these things at all then I'd be much happier. After all, happiness is reality minus expectation.

[kodah]

This is most accurate to my experience as well. While I don't think it's helpful to disparage management as a whole, I do think it's beneficial to talk about where bad management exists, why, and how frequently. On the flip side, people talking as if bad management doesn't exist or is some minority I think are forgetting not every SWE works in the valley at a FAANG or bootstrapped to-be-unicorn company.