[nawitus]

>If you lost the manager (who is calculating deadlines, coordinating with other departments, pitching for funding, as well as managing the individual developers) the project could run into problems quickly.

Really? In my experience managers can be replaced rather easily, or at least more easily than it is to a replace a single engineer. It always takes some time for the new software engineer to learn the specifics of the project, and even more time to really grasp the business domain. The new manager has stuff to learn too, of course, but in my opinion it's less than what a new engineer needs to learn.

In addition, if you replace two software engineers, you pretty much lose two man-months of work, but replacing a manager shouldn't cause much problems in the first month.

[nostrademons]

If you're a manager your biggest asset is relationships with developers and with peers across the organization. Those assets can't be replaced at all - it takes time to build trust, and trust is completely non-fungible between people. I've seen departments just decimated (worse, actually...decimate means "to kill 10%", and in this case over 50% of leads & senior engineers left) because a well-respected manager left.

[jasonwocky]

> Really? In my experience managers can be replaced rather easily, or at least more easily than it is to a replace a single engineer.

Possibly true. But think about how most engineering managers attained that role...it was because companies thought they were good engineers, despite little if any evidence that they'd ever make good managers. Throw in a dash of, "we don't really have a training budget" for this new profession (which it is...management is an entirely different profession from engineering), and you have a recipe for disappointing, easily replaceable parts.

[andyidsinga]

It seems you're both right - but that good managers and good engineers are both rather difficult to replace.

The problem being that replacement "good" managers and engineers aren't just sitting around waiting for you to hire them - they're already in good jobs - see also: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

Additionally, for managers, you can't promote from your summer interns.