Managing people is very difficult. Each person has his/her own opinion. In one company my team had 12 people, we argued about everything in every project and the manager did not know how to handle it. In the end the manager made us do a psycological profile test, then some councelors came in and taught us how to work together.

My last manager was very young. He was a junior programmer, then a couple year later promoted to programmer, then later on promoted to manager. The problem was other senior programmers did not trust him nor respect him. I myself also thought his management skill was not too good.

At the same time, there were three managers at the same time decided to step down to become programmer. They said they had too much stress, they felt they were the meat of the sandwich between the higher management and the programmers. They did not make a lot more money than the senior programmers, they had to due with so much politics, so they decided they rather go back to programming.