I don’t necessarily believe that managers need hard skills relevant to the business (and I say this as an engineer).
However, they need to be crystal clear on what they manage (wether it’s just a team, department or entire company) is supposed to deliver and how it will be evaluated. If they don’t know this they can’t prioritize and they can’t ask the relevant questions to the experts to help them with that.
This brings me to the second thing Managers really need; they need to be able to listen. The manager is there to manage, he or she is not there to build stuff and thus he or she has to acknowledge that they don’t know as mych about the problems facing the project as the experts. A manager needs the experts’ opinions to guide them towards the best decision.
Plenty of managers can talk (that’s one of the readons they were noticed by their superiors) but few can listen and are thus oblivious to what should be prioritized above what (I work mainly on the backend, I had to basically force the issue of load testing before launch into meeting after meeting but my manager was very interested in the colors of the GUI) and which problems will take a lot of work and which could be fixed in 15 minutes.
If you want a manager with hard skills as good as yours, wouldn’t you rather have them as a member of the team instead?
I agree when you say 'They need to listen' but the ability to listen requires a lot of time and experience working in the trenches. How can someone sympathize with the people they are managing if they've never put themselves in other people's shoes on a day to day basis. How are they ever going to offer solutions to problems that crop up when they have minimal or no domain knowledge?
Most managers I talk to are all about the 'power' over people. When I meet them a a social gathering and ask them what they do the replies are usually along the lines of "I manage 5 people on a daily basis" or "I have 10 people under me". It just shows the mindset of these so called, manager so clearly.
Management is something of an art, don't get me wrong. It is a very important skill, what I'm saying is to be a good manager you need to have the 'hard skill' it's a prerequisite to being a good manager.
This brings me to the second thing Managers really need; they need to be able to listen. The manager is there to manage, he or she is not there to build stuff and thus he or she has to acknowledge that they don’t know as mych about the problems facing the project as the experts. A manager needs the experts’ opinions to guide them towards the best decision.
Plenty of managers can talk (that’s one of the readons they were noticed by their superiors) but few can listen and are thus oblivious to what should be prioritized above what (I work mainly on the backend, I had to basically force the issue of load testing before launch into meeting after meeting but my manager was very interested in the colors of the GUI) and which problems will take a lot of work and which could be fixed in 15 minutes.
If you want a manager with hard skills as good as yours, wouldn’t you rather have them as a member of the team instead?