Technical leadership: such leaders are often called architects. Of course they need deep technical knowledge.
Project leadership: such leaders are often called project managers or product owners. They only need shallow technical knowledge and can mostly lean on their experts in their team.
Human managers: they deal with personal growth and employment. They need enough technical knowledge to make employment decisions but need not be great programmers.
In large companies these are usually different persons. In a startup the CTO does it all, so of course he must be very technically competent.
It does not always pay to specialize.
I think I understand how it got to be this way, and from a long-term professional point of view, it is probably good for programmers since it makes them less "cogs in a machine". It's also somewhat similar to "real" professions like lawyers, engineers (the kind with a title and professional responsibilities and, in Canada, an iron ring), and doctors, which I suspect programmers will ultimately become, thought it make take several hundred years.
Still, it can be maddeningly complex and seems like a lot of the time is too much overhead. On the other hand, a team is an engineered thing just like any other, in that there are tradeoffs. Management and capital largely seem to prefer predictably-scheduled software projects with accurate estimates to fast iteration and low overhead. One way to make this tradeoff is to have several clipboard-holders on a team looking at metrics daily, and spending 1 day out of every 10 in "sprint planning".
For example, rarely does a firm just "hire" a lawyer and tell him what to do: they have to at least play along with the fiction that they are "junior partners" in a "partnership". They have professional obligations (to the Bar, for example) that are outside their employment obligations. It's not unreasonably for there to be more "overhead" positions for a practice than there are lawyers, because his time is to incredibly valuable that it makes economic sense for him to hire several paralegals and a secretary, not counting the "junior partners" that are employees in all but name. If lawyers were cheap (i.e. there was no cartel and fewer barriers to practice), the practice of law would look much different, and vice versa.
These things don't necessarily require professional services. They certainly don't require taking time off in the middle of the day to go to an oak-paneled office with potted plants and an anteroom. We could organize our society to give people justice without traditional law practices. We've chosen not to because the benefits accrue to a well-connected minority and the downsides accrue dripwise to the rest of us.
Note that LegalZoom and a few others are indeed trying to do this, but even they are forced to equivocate that they're not really lawyers. It's the legal equivalent of making tobacco companies put diseased lungs on their cigarette packaging, except it's not correcting for an externality, but imposing one. Why do I even need LegalZoom for a will? Shouldn't there be a government website where I can register my will for free? Should I need a lawyer and a judge to give me a no-fault divorce?
You don't. You can hand write it on paper.
> Shouldn't there be a government website where I can register my will for free?
Registering a will is mostly a fallback to let people locate it.
> Should I need a lawyer and a judge to give me a no-fault divorce?
If there is nothing in dispute, you only need a judge (because a divorce is a court order.) You may need a lawyer to sure that your settlement achieves what you want, or to deal with disputes about the resolution as to property, etc.
If you still disagree then I think we have different intuitions about the difficulty of wearing different hats in management positions. This is somehow analogous to the split on full-stack vs. specialized development. Interestingly, full-stack teams have been heads and shoulders above in quality in my experience.
The only caveat to this statement I'd make, based on my own experience, is that for the most successful full-stack teams I've known, having at least one of the team members dedicated as a front-end specialist is a major advantage. Someone who is honestly interested in the State of the Art and who is well-versed in the associated tooling and patterns.
They may decide, pragmatically, to work a step or two behind the bleeding edge with their production projects, but they understand what is out there and how that knowledge can be leveraged to help their team succeed. This role acts as a force multiplier and can empower the rest of the team's full-stack developers to build accessible, usable interfaces.
I agree with that. The way I think about it is that in web you benefit from thinking about a system holistically. The divide between front vs back end is merely a technical detail, and an organizational structure that mirrors that divide has a strong potential to artificially create friction between two parts of what should be a whole.
Beyond that, I personally feel more empowered to take on responsibility as a full-stack dev, compared to when I was previously focusing on just the backend. For me, I think it’s mostly a psychological shift: I have more confidence to focus on solutions instead of deferring responsibility and thought power to someone else because it’s not my domain.
So, while full-stack may be a generalist (which for some is a pejorative) in a technical sense, I see the general technical acumen as just one aspect of a higher level, more intangible specialization: solving problems and getting shit done.
That sounds a bit lofty but I think it has analog to the bigger conversation here about managing.
Manager with holistic responsibility for a project > manager with isolated responsibility for a single aspect of a project.
Technical and programming skills have very little overlap with successful team management skills. It's the very essence of the Peter Principle.
Hell, the only reason I know what servant leadership IS is because I took a business degree about 10 years into my software career.
Do you really believe that? When you're interviewing someone to be your manager, is that what you look for? I don't. I look for communication skills, career development ideas, and evidence that they stay cool under pressure. Software development experience is definitely a plus, but I don't look for someone as a manager who can code better than anyone else.
The best managers I've worked for knew how to navigate the bureaucracy and politics of a large company and had next to no technical talent.
The best leaders I've worked for knew how to get shit done. If anyone dropped the ball, they could pick it up and score the points.
Also to be clear, I'm not talking about software development in the mythical man month sense, but systems thinking and a facility with abstractions and math combined with the ability to make such ideas real. Such people have the power to lift everyone up to their level, guide the group along an easy path, and fill in the gaps in ability present in their team.
There is a reason that people learn martial arts from people who have developed skill at them, not those who are good at managing workouts. The latter will only teach you how to manage your workouts. If you want to learn an art, learn from a master. In technical domains the masters are the best leaders, and you learn from them in every sense.
Maybe we're envisaging different kinds of projects here. If it were 3-5 people building some component I'd expect there to be a technical leader in that group that can push it forward, as you say. But even they might not be the 'best' coder, whatever that means.
A 50 person project is never going to have a single person like that though.