If this manager hasn't been doing development for 10 years, he is a lot cause. But this doesn't have much to do with programming, just being involved in building software. But in cases where their experience isn't fresh enough, they will have a tendency to either be static (we will write our web project in COBOL, because that is what I used to use dammit) or be very trendy to a fault (I heard post modern node-oriented programming was hot, let's use that for our compiler).