Others may have a different term for this concept (the problem with language) – this paper explains my context more clearly:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=2A41ED99195A7EEB2962D451AF42BE25?contentType=Article&hdAction=lnkhtml&contentId=844110

These two organizations are probably exceptions though, which would make this a bit off-topic.

Another slashdot-esque car analogy that came to my mind when I first read this post was that of a mechanical engineer driving a car vs. a car mechanic driving a car. If the car breaks down, the engineer will probably better appreciate the causes of failure, but at the end, the mechanic will probably fix it faster.

Nousheen has made a good point about career ladder. Somehow all good architects end up being project managers … but that requires a different skill set and you need to be wired differently to do that job well …

I feel (and hope) that the time is coming when the Architect will have a higher salary than the PM. Although he may report to the PM …

and i echo both your disclaimers, however i do believe our realities are what we make of it or whatever lens we are wearing at the time..

By no means did i want to suggest that the size of the team should limit the size of a company or that one company should not have multiple teams. That would be quite a ridiculous suggestion, wouldnt it My point was that when your team starts becoming bigger than 20-25 ppl, something is amiss somewhere. At that point, you need to modularize your project, break it up into smaller pieces and assign each piece to a separate team headed by a technical manager. Unfortunately even the project modularization is a pretty technical task itself so no marks for guessing who i think should do it As for management training given to technical people at google etc., I agree with you 100%. Management is a skill learned by training or experience and engineers shouldnt assume that they can automatically become good managers. However, i think our discussion is about the need for managers to know technology rather than the importance of management as an acquired skill.

punslinger, my assumption is that we are primarily talking about project managers here. I am interested in knowing who a team/personnel manager is and what exactly does he/she do in a technology group?

Let me also add my disclaimer to pulsinger’s. These are my views, heavily tainted by the views of people like steve barley and bob sutton – a couple of profs i studied with. Bob Sutton actually goes so far as to say “sometimes the best management is no management at all.”

“Dont all technology companies aspire to maintain their startup culture? ”

Many companies do not have a startup culture in its latest sense to begin with, so I doubt we can generalize.

Regarding the team size, Mansoor stole my words – there are global projects spanning multiple locations and components, and the sheer size of the project and multitude of technologies used makes it very hard (though not impossible) for a project manager to be well-versed in all of them – it becomes sufficient if he knows the capabilities of each technology, something that a primer level document can easily deliver to an intelligent manager, so that he can leave the nitty gritty technology decisions to the specialists i.e. the architects, and he can consult with the architects during client negotiation phases.

In fact, when this post says “Manager” it does not clarify whether it is a “Project Manager” or a “Team/Personnel Manager” that is being discussed, I believe they are two different roles. In the above scenario, a Project Manger managing a huge project could be a domain expert (of financial or scientific applications for example) rather than a manager-formerly-known-as-architect.

In another permutation, one can have resources contributing to multiple projects, each with their own architect, and in this case also, a manager would usually focus on time/task allocations and let the architects estimate and do their own jobs.

Disclaimer: This is my own world-view which may be pretty distorted.