Purpose of an IT manager (Score 5, Interesting)

Any IT manager needs to have exactly the following skills:

• Ability to listen and understand his techies. This usually means he needs to have been an IT grunt at some point in his career.
• Ability to take their advice and repackage it into something that he can present to the folks who sign the check
• Ability to prevent anyone outside IT from intruding directly into the IT employee's time. Act as a gatekeeper unless specifically requested not to by a techie.

While we techies know our shit, too frequently we don't know how to explain it to the people who we're helping out, and seldom can do so to those who are going to give us the money to by the equipment we need. A manager who can keep us working happily by filtering innane problems to us rather than having us spend 100% of the time helping people move their mouse is the only way to keep us from jumping ship. And having the manager communicate our needs in the marketing speak that we don't have is the only way to get us our toys so we are happy in our jobs.

A good IT manager knows enough to understand the geeks, figure out when we're lying, and protect us from politics and direct moron access.