I hope he gets to see your comment b/c its not something that would get mentioned by his coders. So do you feel like its a good idea on paper for managers to know the nature of the programmers work that well?
A good manager should be technical so that you can engage him in a very technical conversation and he should be able to follow along. But I don't think you specifically need to be a coder to do that, I've seen other good managers come from non-programming backgrounds.
That being said, my best manager was a former coder-turned-manager. When he was coding, he wasn't the most brilliant coder in the group, but neither am I. He knew about the coding process and how long things take, etc, so that was genuinely helpful.
But what made him my best manager was because he knew how to keep us shielded from the BS from customers and upper management, and he genuinely cared about our professional and personal development. This garnered a great deal of loyalty from me and my other coworkers, so he was able to get a lot of good work from us in the years that I was with him.
