Letting the guys/gals under you take decisions that will affect your very job is not something for the faint of heart. Lotsa stress if your team don’t perform too well or made a big mistake and the manager is often the one who gets replaced. So cover your ass is the norm against such eventuality which mean incompetence and corruption sets in fast and stay there.

I don’t think it is one-sided. Most of situations I have in mind while reading this are from my managerial spells. The slight difference is I’m aware that I was (and I still am) clueless in a number of cases. Majority of managers neither are aware nor care about this.

I don’t say you should have the same code-level knowledge as every single one developer in your team. What I say is managers often lack knowledge in areas where they should know it all.

In general we suck at being managers. I guess we suck at being managers even more than we sucked at being developers.

Once you’ve been promoted from pure DEV, you’ll appreciate this article.

http://softarc.blogspot.com/2008/02/ten-things-developers-would-know-if.html

I recently wrote in more depth about what I call “decision latitude” that loosely addresses this specific topic here: http://bit.ly/9Kt00D

The architecture however is pretty tricky. I mean it’s pretty often case when people who have enough experience to build the right architecture tend to step back from coding which naturally reduce their knowledge about current technologies. On the other hand I’m allergic to those folks who haven’t yet created any real system but are all into new trends and they tend to make decisions basing on what’s cool, not what’s right.

I know pretty few persons who fit the role of architect in a way you describe it. And yes, this is sad.

Owner of my firm was a Fox programmer and I picked up some coding tricks from him. But he used to have an idea that he can code in any new technology better than us developers (programmer with superiority complex… no way :) ) . So we started treating him as he was one of us, bombing him with technical info and asking him to make decisions based on facts etc. So he changed his mind and let us code.

To loosen up architect fact. They don’t have to code every day but they can’t be technology agnostic theorists. I was led by a guy like this and it was one of the biggest frustrations in my life.

I’m surprised so few managers realize this.

Even though I do, I’m far from keeping myself far from discussing development issues. I engage most architectural discussions in the team and pretty often my arguments are taken into serious consideration. I don’t want to say it happens always for good, but I can’t say it is always (or even usually) for bad. Thus I don’t agree with “who doesn’t code doesn’t get to speak about the code.”

As far as final decision are made by people who code, and this is how it works in our team, everyone is invited to speak up. I’ve seen it a number of times when non-developer brought a valid argument which changed final decisions.

But in general I’m with you: let developers code, let managers manage.

To bring this back in context of software development:

1.Who doesn’t code doesn’t get to speak about the code. That includes architects that don’t code and usually only frustrate people that do actual work.

2.If manager needs to sort out his developers, he should ask his team lead to do that and explain how and why he did it.

3. If managers want to better control of the development process (that he don’t understand), he should establish communication and control points and not constantly tell developers what to do.

You get it right – managers are much more often forced to make decisions and they make it, no matter how clueless they are. Developers, or any other line workers, do it rarely and even then they can take a step back and ask for a decision one of their managers, which they often do.

This is by the way one of things I hear from newbie managers: suddenly they have to make all these decisions by themselves while earlier they could just pass it to their manager. This is a quite a mind-shift.