Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This is a tough question since what's best for the team and what's personally best for the manager's career may be in conflict, at least when it comes to the long-term. A manager who doesn't do any coding will over time get rusty and get further and further away from the current best practices, latest library/framework hotness etc. This can lead to awkward conversations of the type where the manager suggests "let's do/use X" where X was the best practice 5+ years ago and then it has to be diplomatically explained to him/her that's no longer the best practice. It can also be dispiriting to the manager if they got into software development because they enjoy coding, but now they have to deal with planning, people management etc., which they might be good at, but it may not bring them the same level of job satisfaction.


> This can lead to awkward conversations of the type where the manager suggests "let's do/use X" where X was the best practice 5+ years ago and then it has to be diplomatically explained to him/her that's no longer the best practice

I wish managers would understand that it's not their job to do that any more - I've had a few technical managers in my time and the best one was totally hands off, except when he recognised a scenario that had caused him grief in the past (e.g. boolean fields in a database or anything completely over-engineered). The other ones have just rapidly descended into "I'm the manager therefore my opinion is final" (including one who had never worked with Java, PHP, MySQL, serverless or AWS but didn't let it stop him from having strongly held technical opinions).




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: