I always had this post in mind. In fourteen years as a developers (and sometimes offshore), I found these weird patterns about managers.
Let's say you come from outside to an office, and you don't see where everybody sits, you just see the behavior. What would you think about this profile?
-People who can't typewrite. They just use two fingers.
-People who can't speak in English, or have a horrible accent and they are not willing to correct any of their usual mistakes.
-People who don't have any group initiative, such as puttying money for buying a present for a guy who is going to be a father, or a group bet before a match.
-People who absolutely never pay a coffee to anybody.
Yes, that's right. That's the profile of a manager here.
I have seen some exceptions: for example, my first manager was one of them (at least an exception in the first points). But curiously, she was the worst manager I ever had.
The thing is that in the year 2000... ok, it was possible to find people with some lacks of knowledge and still understand that they were managers. But the weirdest thing is checking, so long after, that these kind of profiles are the ones that get promoted.
Ah, of course, one more thing: low technical depth. I never saw a manager with a record of programming excellence.
Conclusions? Good question. I guess the reason why a manager promotes a subordinated into being a manager is basically trust. So if you want to become a manager, try hard to get a good relationship with your manager, become a friend of s/he, have a good relation and a good communication, and the best of all: do some personal favors (even if they are not asked) so that the manager owes you something. Doing your work correctly is apparently just secondary.
