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.