Every engineer has probably thought at some point in their career what's the point of the manager? Managers are basically extensions and the eyes and ears of upper management which doesn't scale very well... they are there to communicate the vision and pass the word, ensure work is delivered consistently, employees are happy or have just about enough incentive to stay...some may go above and beyond into coaching their reports if they care but sinply it's all about making sure the team doesn't fuck up and looks good to the boss...
I found this helpful. There aren't many easily discoverable resources where effective management techniques are distilled. I'm writing a guide on coaching for my company and not only are there mountains of information all over the place, a whole lot of it is bullshit.
The article looks very generic except for : "In Google's case, they want managers having key technical skills (like coding, etc.) so they can share "been there done that" experience."
I believe lacking technical skills is what causes many to perceive managers as useless. Managers have a lot of power over the teams they manage and experienced workers may see a lack of technical skill as not being qualified to hold this power.
I quit because my former supervisor does not even know what git or ssh are. We are a very technical/IT company. There's no excuse to be ignorant of such things.
I made the decisions that fellow team members went with on several occasions. The supervisor sat on their laptop playing chess on Facebook. I am not even joking.
When you have people at the same horizontal hierarchical level as you coming to you straight instead of our supervisor, it says a lot.
I figured the company doesn't want to bump my pay for doing my supervisor's job so I will leave first chance I get. I did and I feel lighter. Maybe I lost weight.
So I agree, a manager needs some "been there done that" experience.
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I believe lacking technical skills is what causes many to perceive managers as useless. Managers have a lot of power over the teams they manage and experienced workers may see a lack of technical skill as not being qualified to hold this power.
So I agree, a manager needs some "been there done that" experience.