[msclrhd]

The tricky part of this is that not all programmers make good managers, or want to be promoted into management. They are different skill sets. That said, having a basic understanding of the difficulties and things that take time (learning new technology, investigating/debugging an issue, etc.) would be a good thing to have as a manager. Also, being able to assist where possible -- asking if the developer needs someone to help out, finding people with the relevant skills to mentor the developer (or finding suitable courses/training/books), etc.

[twodave]

I mean, is it really this hard? This is not a good/bad manager problem to me, this is an organizational culture kind of problem. As a manager I'd expect my three top priorities to be ensuring enough devs are on the team, communicating priorities effectively, and unblocking the devs on the team as needed.