> I don't dispute that plenty of successful leaders in technical organizations have become rusty as hackers when they hit the mega-seniority, but the idea that some L6/L7 manager shouldn't be able to lift some of their team's serious code off the ground, let alone some undergraduate dynamic-programming interview question as was the original point of my original post is simply contradicted by a mountain of evidence both generally-available and anecdotal to numerous people in this thread.
I think this is the root of the disagreement. I want my managers to be technically capable with an engineering background. As far as I know, my entire leadership chain, arguably excepting my SVP and CEO (at Google) have such a background. Yes they should be able to pass a tech screening and certainly system design.
They should have enough knowlege to know why you're making certain technical decisions and be able to see that you're justifying them well. That's all true. What I'm saying is that a manager who is staying so deeply aware of the details of all of their reports work that they can drop in and take over in a pinch probably has too much context. I'm not making an argument on abstract technical ability or knowhow.
Like in the same way that my entire management chain has technical knowlege and background, practically none of them have submitted code at work in the last 3-4 years at minimum, for some that's their entire career at Google. I expect that, with enough effort they could all work on the projects I work on and make contributions, but they'd need to learn all of {language and codestyle, libraries and relevant tactical design patterns and norms, various technical constraints to the design that are important but nonobvious}, so in most cases it would be similar to onboarding someone who was a technical contributor from another team or an experienced new hire. I don't really consider some random employee of Facebook to be someone who could "do my job in a pinch" either, even if they're more technically competent than I am.
I think this is the root of the disagreement. I want my managers to be technically capable with an engineering background. As far as I know, my entire leadership chain, arguably excepting my SVP and CEO (at Google) have such a background. Yes they should be able to pass a tech screening and certainly system design.
They should have enough knowlege to know why you're making certain technical decisions and be able to see that you're justifying them well. That's all true. What I'm saying is that a manager who is staying so deeply aware of the details of all of their reports work that they can drop in and take over in a pinch probably has too much context. I'm not making an argument on abstract technical ability or knowhow.
Like in the same way that my entire management chain has technical knowlege and background, practically none of them have submitted code at work in the last 3-4 years at minimum, for some that's their entire career at Google. I expect that, with enough effort they could all work on the projects I work on and make contributions, but they'd need to learn all of {language and codestyle, libraries and relevant tactical design patterns and norms, various technical constraints to the design that are important but nonobvious}, so in most cases it would be similar to onboarding someone who was a technical contributor from another team or an experienced new hire. I don't really consider some random employee of Facebook to be someone who could "do my job in a pinch" either, even if they're more technically competent than I am.