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.