A lot of managers have become managers because they had "enough" with keeping up with all the technologies and writing code.<p>Most organizations actually favors this model where you had a good productive engineer who is now either burned out or has reached limit for growing and updating skills. The only way to move forward in their career is switch to being manager where they don't have to show great chops at coding anymore.<p>Consequently, the secret to finding great managers is just this: Ask them what code they wrote in past year, what feature they shipped on their own, how much code they expect to write in their new job and so on.
[On good engineers]<p>> <i>Taking on the role of a manager means giving up time doing what they love — solving challenging technical problems — in exchange for what they see as taking out the trash every night.</i><p>I can't help but feel that there is more than just a kernel of truth in this otherwise cynical statement. I feel that I fall at least in part to this group - while I try to manage engineers, I constantly have this nagging feeling that I am not doing enough. After all, there are things to be done in the code world that require attention and nobody has the bandwidth.<p>It's a terrible feeling.