I commend you for having an opinion so bad I can't tell if you're satirizing marxists or not.

Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".

well, not the original poster, but I have been managed by both kinds, and the best manager I ever had was not a former techie and the worst was a former programmer.

The worst manager did often say things that were sort of valuable and correct in a general way, like "well you don't actually know that because it hasn't been tested" which was of course true, but he also seemed to think he could tell people what the correct way to do something was without knowing the technology and the codebase. This often meant that I had to go to junior developers later, after a meeting, and say "concerning ticket X, T. didn't consider these things(listing the things), so that while it is true that we should in principle do what T. said, it will not be adequate, you will also need to do this - look at the code for this function here, it should be abstracted out in some way probably, this was my crappy way of handling the problem in desperation Y months ago."

Trying to explain to him why he was wrong was impossible in itself, he was a tech genius evidently, and you just had to give it up after a bit, and figure that at some time in the future the decisions would be reversed after "we learned" something.¨

on edit: in the example I give the manager as I said was correct in what he wanted done, but as I said it was inadequate as the bug would keep recurring if only that was done, so more things had to be done that were not as pretty or as pure as what he wanted.

I want my manager to help get the business out of my way- managing requirements, keeping external dependencies on track, fussy paperwork and such.

I don't need my manager second-guessing my every decision or weighing in on my PRs making superficial complaints about style while also bemoaning our velocity.

Hands down, the best managers I've had have all been clueless about the languages and types of work I do, and the worst managers have (or think they) have some understanding of what I do.

Oh, I vastly prefer people who don’t understand and know it.

Reminds me of Frank Zappa comparing "cigar chomping old guys" to the "hip young types" that replaced them

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0

> Let me ask you this, would you rather be managed by a hierarchy made up of people who don't understand what you do? Because I assure you it is far worse than being managed by "class traitors".

One's direct manager should be a developer, yes. The problem is the level above that - most organisations don't have a SWE career track, so if you want a pay rise you need a promotion and that's only available for managerial roles.

The problem there is that a lot of developers make very bad managers and a lot of organisations don't give a fuck about giving their managers the proper skills training. The result is then usually a "tech director" who hasn't touched code in years but just loves to micromanage based on knowledge from half a decade ago or more. That's bad enough in Java, but in NodeJS, Go, Rust or other hipster reinvent-the-wheel stacks it's dangerous.

They come in and blather completely irrelevant, way outdated or completely wrong "advice", plan projects with way less resources than the project would actually need - despite knowing what "crunch time" entails for their staff themselves.