Can non-developers manage developers?

I think there are different approaches to engineering leadership, and different needs in engineering leadership. And I think that's what's very important to identify: you have very specific technical leadership. You have your principal engineer, your system architect kind of role, and you have team-building leadership, an organisational-building leadership where you make sure that information flows, that the processes are in place for people to be empowered to make decisions, that people are growing. And I operate more on obviously on the second. So I have been a developer for a short period of time. I have known the ropes of developing, but I quickly became a lead, whether that was a QA Lead or not, for me made less of a difference, because I quickly became a person that was managing other people.

So back to your question, I think a technical background, an understanding of software development is important. But often what happens is that people look specifically for a person who has been doing the job before to then start leading people, where if you just open your mind, and if you really look at, ‘Okay, what are the skills we need for this leadership role right now?’ Maybe it would happen that you would bring people from functions like QA to lead an engineering team.