| >> make management non technical > This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business. I have mixed feelings about this. I used to have a manager (who later became vp) that was technical, and it’s been the worst. Of my professional life so far. He would dictate the technical solution and shut down every initiative, making people below him mere executioners. No room for dissent, he had the last word on everything. The problem being, this person worked for like ~5 years as a developer, then became a manager, then got in charge of infrastructure. And oh boy, infrastructure was not his core competency. So prod infrastructure was essentially at a hobbyist level (everything in the same subnet, some dev stuff along with prod stuff, no network segmentation, a number of things implicitly relied on virtual machines not being rebooted or getting the same ipv4 if rebooted, dns was a patchwork etc). In all this he avoided solutions that he wouldn’t understand (no matter if people below him would understand them). Oh and he would have the console access to cloud services and the authority to do all the testing he wanted, we did not (hence perpetuating some thoroughly artificial knowledge gap). So yeah… having a technical manager can be awful. |
You: "And oh boy, infrastructure was not his core competency."