Yeah! He really shouldn't learn to think more logically, or understand what his employees are going though, or even just enhance his personal growth by learning a new skill. He should be all about the ideas and stay out of programming so that us coders can take our time and bullshit our way out of everything.
I don't think you're being fair. If you've never had a boss who personified the saying "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," you've been very lucky in your career. I had one who would literally tell us to stop what we were doing, institute a whole spate of inefficient methods that we had to follow[1], shout down any objections because "I know a little bit about this stuff," and then leave so he didn't have to witness the fallout. It literally turned a one-hour task into a two-day project.
[1]: The details of the rules are kind of specific to the domain, which is not primarily software, but think along the lines of "All code must be written in Word, since I know it well, and no weird 'makefiles' or anything else that's hard to read. Oh, and since code-sharing is important, everything has to be printed out in triplicate." It's that kind of inefficiency.
I'm sorry, but he's a fucking moron and an asshole. Even if he'd never learned to code he'd still be screwing up your day. You're confounding his personality with the fact that he learned some programming.
As I see it: If your boss is an enormous idiot you have a problem anyways. I can't imagine someone, a manager no less, to act that stupid. How did he manage to keep his job?
In this particular instance, it was a small company and the top people were the owner and his relatives. But it happens at all levels. Usually it's not quite that blatant, but assuming you know what's involved in other people's jobs is a common failing for humans in general. It just happens to be particularly damaging when it's a manager because they have the ability to act on their misconceptions.
