the best manager I ever had was a VP who came from a banking background—the key thing was not that he had written a lot of production software himself, but that he had seen what great software looks like (apparently he worked closely with the core Slang/SecDB guys), and was willing to trust engineers who could build similar styles of tools

on the other hand, the recent skip-level I had that got me to quit in six months was an engineer himself, but had no real opinion on code quality or anything more than a superficial, process-oriented understanding of the dynamics on the team :(

moral of the story: taste is necessary; direct technical experience is mostly necessary, but nowhere near sufficient