Your Manager Should Be Good at Their Job First
Deric Yee
2nd December 2025
Somewhere inside the modern workplace, a strange idea took root: that management is a separate species of work. The moment someone becomes a “manager,” they transcend the very craft they’re supposed to guide.
That belief is outdated. If a manager can’t do the core work of the team, or at least deeply understand it, they’re not a manager. They’re overhead.
This line gets used like a magic spell to justify incompetence.
The stereotype used to be that engineers, designers, marketers, or ops people “aren’t great with people,” so teams needed a layer of professional talkers who could sit in meetings and act as human routers.
Modern evidence says otherwise.
Google’s Project Oxygen, a multi-year study involving more than 10,000 observations, found that the best managers consistently had strong technical expertise in the roles they oversaw. This wasn’t a small-effect detail, the presence of technical competence was one of the strongest predictors of team performance.
Teams don’t need “people people.”
Teams need competent people who understand people.
Here’s the simple logic:
If someone leads a team but can’t provide valuable input, can’t evaluate quality, and can’t catch obvious mistakes, then what exactly are they leading?
Steve Jobs said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
But here’s the catch: smart people can only contribute meaningfully when their manager understands enough to evaluate, challenge, and elevate their thinking.
Otherwise, the team ends up doing the manager’s job for them.
And morale collapses, fast.
Harvard Business Review once surveyed 35,000 workers across the US and UK. The strongest predictor of job satisfaction wasn’t salary or perks. It was having a manager who actually understood the work being managed.
Competence isn’t a luxury. It’s the job.
Managers Need Empathy, Not Excuses
A technical manager who hasn’t touched real work in years eventually loses their feel for the job:
The constraints.
The frustrations.
The tradeoffs.
The constant firefighting.
The invisible work that never shows up on KPIs.
Without this context, they drift into unrealistic expectations and corporate delusion.
Empathy without competence is sympathy.
Competence without empathy is tyranny.
Real leadership is both.
Not every minute of every day. But they must stay close enough to the craft to be useful.
A sales manager should still be able to close.
A design manager should still be able to critique a layout and understand modern tools.
An engineering manager should still commit code, review PRs, or reason about architecture.
A marketing manager should still be able to build campaigns and read analytics.
If the work becomes “beneath them,” they’ve already failed.
INB4: “So the CEO needs to be able to do everything?”
No.
But the leaders of each department?
Absolutely.
A Head of Sales who can’t sell is dead weight.
A Head of Engineering who can’t read code is a bottleneck.
A Head of Marketing who can’t run campaigns is an expense item.
Every layer of leadership amplifies or distorts the layers below.
When the top layer is clueless, the distortion grows exponentially.
A manager’s first responsibility is competence.
Their second is leadership.
Their third—and only third—is process, meetings, and everything else.
Getting promoted should not be an escape from real work.
It should be evidence that you’re so good at your craft that you can now help others do it better.
If a manager can’t do the work, doesn’t understand the work, or doesn’t respect the work, they shouldn’t be managing anyone.
And teams will produce better, faster, happier work the moment that standard becomes non-negotiable.
