Decaflon

I agree with your problem but not the solution proposed in the quote. I agree that managers should understand and respect how complex your job really is. I don't agree that a manager needs your experience. Good management is an entirely different skill-set to technical principles.

Good programming/design/technical skills do not necessarily translate to good man-management or large-scale organisational skills. You can see this in the UK games industry where people are promoted into management for the higher pay but have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Projects overrun, workers are unmotivated; everybody is constantly on the lookout for better prospects elsewhere.

I think your problem stemmed from micro-management, which is a problem everywhere. A good manager should trust his or her people to do their own jobs and concentrate on the bigger picture. Too many managers think they could do their employees jobs better than the employees themselves. If that were truly the case, they should be doing those jobs, not wasting their technical skills by pushing paper.

I should probably point out: by manager I'm referring to organisation managers. Team Leaders and technical decision makers should definitely have years of coding/design experience.

I definitely feel the same way. A while ago I had a project manager at a job who had no design skills at all, knew nothing about design concepts or much about development, yet they tried to art direct. I wondered every day how this person got that job. It's so frustrating.

Mutiny! Where is the Mutiny?

I agree, although I have no experience with program managers I have a lot of experience with BS art directors.

"Could you please make 9 different variations of this logo with this, this and this custom font... I have a 40 year old fine arts degree and have never touched illustrator (or a computer) in my life..."

I think the bigger problem is just that there's a lot of bad managers (and employees, for that matter). It doesn't make sense for a manager to have the same skill set as his/her employees. In that vein, the manager must trust the employees they hire to make correct decisions. Basically, good managers don't micromanage and good employees don't need to be micromanaged.

I agree on the sentiment, but not the details. I've seen managers with little to no experience that were fantastic. I've seen managers with 20 years programming experience that were apalling, and still coding the same way they were 20 years ago (sans the punch cards at least.)

I agree with Nicole. It's not a problem intrinsict to software managers, or experience, it's just people in generall that don't know how to do their job, or are incapable of it.

I agree, although I'm not sure about the 20 years part. Of course 20 years for one purpose is completely different for the next. An effective manager usually has a strong grasp of what the people around him are going through and the last two managers I ever had didn't have a clue as to what the code/design processes I was going through and therefore usually made my life a living hell.

Years of experience has little to do with whether a manager is good or not. In fact, given that management of a project and programming aren't the same skillset, it makes little sense to put them on a linear career path.

The single biggest factor I've seen that separates good project managers from bad is whether they view their job as "keeping the staff in line" or "enabling the staff's ability to do their job". Project managers who focused on clearing obstacles for their staff ended up getting higher levels of productivity, more honest estimates of where the geeks were in working toward milestones and got better software.

When managers come at the job with an assumption that the people they're managing are constantly looking for ways to get out of their work and get by doing the least amount possible, they often get exactly that.

This distinction can come from someone who's on their first management job or a seasoned veteran. I think that oftentimes, people learn to do this the hard way, so you may be more likely to find an older veteran who "gets it", but it isn't necessarily the experience that is the indicator to look for.

"I think there is some element of truth in this new perspective of mine. Managers should not be managers until they've written code for something like 20 years or so. They shouldn't be deciding things that they have no real experience in."

As others have replied, that is irrelevant. If you're looking at experience, the number of years isn't directly proportional to the amount of knowledge. For instance, it might take a comp-sci major 5-8 years to gain the knowledge that I have with a software engineering degree...and even then they might not learn everything if they're not exposed to it.

You had a bad experience with a manager, that's life, move on. You're going to encounter many more most likely. Software developers and engineers have quite an ego (myself and apparently yourself as well) which often results in not trusting teammates, you just need to get past that.