I think the author seems to underestimate the importance of having a technically competent manager (he seems to work at ITA, so he probably never had to deal with that ;-)).
In my experience technical skills should are a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for being a manager. How do you expect someone to lead salesmen, programmers, or widget makers if they don't understand what their workers do?
'Management Skills', imho, can't exist in a vacuum without technical skills to back them up (which also means that 'management skills' don't magically translate between industries). 'Management Skills' are a conglomeration of inter-personal, bureaucratic, and technical skills.
As a bit of an aside, this is one of the big problems I have with many MBAs. Good MBAs have already put in years to hone their technical skills and then go back to school to augment what they already know. The bad ones (a depressingly large proportion of the ones I've met) have no technical skills (or technical skills so far outside their current work area as to be useless). I've even met a couple of managers who did their MBA right after finishing their undergrad degree (wtf?).
I'm not suggesting that the manager should be the most technically skilled person on a team, but he should have sufficient technical chops to at least understand and evaluate what his employees are doing.
I personally think that any manager interview should include the type of managerial behavioral questions that the author proposes in addition to a standard interview that his workers face. A programmer's manager should also be asked questions about Big-O notation, pointers, etc.
If you wouldn't hire the guy as programmer (the tech du jour may change, but the fundamentals don't) why hire him as a manager?
And, as a personal note, congrats on working at ITA. I'm moving to Cambridge in a couple of weeks and hope to join you guys one day. It takes a special type of man to look at the traveling salesmen problem and say, "You know what, this looks too simple. What can we do to make it more fun?" ;-)
You're absolutely right. I'm assuming the other hackers that are interviewing the manager will take care of that. Usually, technical skills are almost the only focus, so the post focuses only on the management skills.
I was part of a team interviewing manager candidates, and it seemed the only thing people focused on was technical ability. We passed by several very good candidates who were only so-so technically, and got someone who was really good technically but failed pretty much every question asked here. He proved so incompetent that we let him go after a few months.
It was actually kind of depressing, I could see the wrong decisions being made, but none of the other hackers knew much about this "management stuff," so I couldn't convince them.
In my experience technical skills should are a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for being a manager. How do you expect someone to lead salesmen, programmers, or widget makers if they don't understand what their workers do?
'Management Skills', imho, can't exist in a vacuum without technical skills to back them up (which also means that 'management skills' don't magically translate between industries). 'Management Skills' are a conglomeration of inter-personal, bureaucratic, and technical skills.
As a bit of an aside, this is one of the big problems I have with many MBAs. Good MBAs have already put in years to hone their technical skills and then go back to school to augment what they already know. The bad ones (a depressingly large proportion of the ones I've met) have no technical skills (or technical skills so far outside their current work area as to be useless). I've even met a couple of managers who did their MBA right after finishing their undergrad degree (wtf?).
I'm not suggesting that the manager should be the most technically skilled person on a team, but he should have sufficient technical chops to at least understand and evaluate what his employees are doing.
I personally think that any manager interview should include the type of managerial behavioral questions that the author proposes in addition to a standard interview that his workers face. A programmer's manager should also be asked questions about Big-O notation, pointers, etc.
If you wouldn't hire the guy as programmer (the tech du jour may change, but the fundamentals don't) why hire him as a manager?
And, as a personal note, congrats on working at ITA. I'm moving to Cambridge in a couple of weeks and hope to join you guys one day. It takes a special type of man to look at the traveling salesmen problem and say, "You know what, this looks too simple. What can we do to make it more fun?" ;-)