The quiet disappearance of the non-technical engineering manager

In all fairness most developers have never shipped an architecture of their own authoring. Instead they using something like React or Spring Boot or whatever.

Managing people and managing infrastructure are separate skills. I have had some really amazing managers who were non-technical and some really shitty management that were technical. Now, in all fairness those shitty leaders were typically technical name only as the kind of people reliant on third party software to do 95% of everything.

As somebody who has been in corporate software for 20 years, given the choice between an insecure technology guy that can’t write their own architecture versus a brilliant people person I would choose the later for leadership absolutely every fucking time. I left my last job due to a toxic as fuck technology leader that couldn’t measure anything. I choosing to remain unemployed instead of going back to that bullshit.

EDIT: I thought about this a bit more. It’s simple. If they cannot write their own architectural solutions or measure things with numbers they are not a technical leader. If a person is then not a valid tech leader and not a people person they are a deficit, a net negative to leadership.