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They come in and blather completely irrelevant, way outdated or completely wrong "advice", plan projects with way less resources than the project would actually need - despite knowing what "crunch time" entails for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

And also, the programmers that got "promoted" to management are people that are here for the money/power and asked to be promoted, not because they care about coding. And absolutely not because their peers wanted for them to be promoted because they saw a good manager in them while they were working together.

So they'll definitely make it worse for everyone than a guy that doesn't know anything about tech but wanted a career in management because they care about managing.