During the heat of Twitter Acquisition, Elon Musk tweeted this. It caused a large amount of discussion on Tech Twitter and in the Tech community.
And I mostly agree with Elon here. It is one thing to be a non-technical CEO and rely on your CTO for managing the tech team, and an entirely different thing to be a non-technical manager inside of the tech team. Such managers MUST be technically excellent compared to the team they are supposed to be leading. That is if the team is to function effectively and excellently.
Before I lay out the reasons, I want to show a tweet I came across just a few days prior. This is by a tech Twitter personality who works as an Engineering Manager.
"Most people" are right in this case. When I saw this, I thought what a sad sight. That's just doing half the job. The 'average' part of it sounded like they were bad at it and under the Illusory Superiority effect thought they were average.
This tweet gave me a flashback to a time when a newly hired EM turned out to be very technically incompetent. Working with them was a pain. One day in their first month, when I suggested we not use Floats for money calculations, they asked me to explain the difference between Float and BigDecimal - on a public slack channel. On another day, but in their first month still, they grossly overestimated and committed the timeline for a project, and then instead of managing up, they attempted to make the team work weekends. When I left that role, I breathed a sigh of relief at not having to deal with them anymore even though the rest of my colleagues were quite good. Currently, I work with a very adept EM and the difference is just night and day.
I do not say you must be always "down in the trenches" with your "troops", but rather you must possess the ability to do so if called upon.
The biggest downside to being an EM who is not proficient in tech is simply that your team will not respect you. They will not come to you for technical help and suggestions, you will not be consulted for unblocking team members, and your estimations will be second-guessed. If the team culture is grassroots empowered, your decisions will be ignored or overruled in favor of someone more technically adept. If not, you will be secretly despised.
It is not fun to be working for a manager who does not understand your work, who cannot help you out if need be, and who does not know the estimations of time taken for tasks. EMs do have their own set of unique tasks to do, but they must be able to function as a senior member of their team if need be. It's bad for morale to be led by someone "worse" than you.
This guy agrees with me.
There is a nuanced exception here, though. If the manager is very upfront with the team that they lack technical skills and they would defer all the technical decisions to the senior members of the team, and not second-guess their competency, then such an arrangement will work out. That would take an incredible amount of self-confidence and egolessness to say and follow, and I would immediately respect anyone who has that insight about themselves and the comfort with themselves to let the team know.
If you are aspiring to be in Engineering Management, and people like that EM above tell you you can coast by on social skills don't listen to them.
PS: the above EM tweeted a few days later that they were fired, and they were looking a new job (now deleted).
PPS: If you are interested in remote software engineering, and want to be immersed in the culture and community check me out on Twitter.