Oh, come on.  There is little difference between the first and last manager - both border if not cross over into verbal abuse.  Flat out, there is no reason EVER for a manager to yell at an employee, and if that is incorporated into their particular management "styles" then you are working for a bad manager.  End of story no matter how many times the manager apologizes afterwards.

And the part about a good manager "guiding careers?"  My God, are you a professional or a child?  An effective manager is one who anticipates the needs of his staff in getting the job done, and paves the way for the need to be met BEFORE the employee is held up by this.  A good manager LISTENS to his employees and helps them play to their strengths even when it might be at cross purposes to their spoken desires.  In short, an excellent manager gives the employee the path to succeed rather than setting them up to fail.

Recognizing and rewarding accomplishment is an absolute necessity.  The learning Oracle example highlights this.  Every manager should know the market they are in, and that manager SHOULD have known CICS programmers were readily available.  At that point, you look at your staff and decide who has earned the privilege of learning new (and marketable) job skills on the company dime.  You reward the staff member with the new, plum assignment and backfill their job, even if it is a mission-critical role.  That is, unless you take the approach by so many managers and companies these days, and assume that employees are like buses - another one comes along every 30 minutes.

Finally, the old chestnut about a manager not really needing technical skills is a load.  While the manager might not need to be as technically inclined as his staff, he needs to understand the business at that level.  You can't take a sales manager and make him the supervisor of a group of developers just because he has people skills.  Let's face facts here - at the best of times, IT lifers have more personality quirks than your average employee, and knowing how the employee works - of which the technical aspect is one of the most key elements - is how a manager succeeds.

I am sorry, I don't mean to be so hyper-critical, but having been on all sides of this particular table it is a subject I am VERY passionate about.  I once worked for a man who got in the deep brush with me and helped me clear the path - and then stood in the background while I got the credit for a job well done.  If I screwed up, he stood between me and the user and took the heat.  If I tried to snow him on a tech issue, he called me on it because he knew what I did, not just what our department's mission was.  And when I found a new way of doing something that saved ANYTHING, he rewarded the effort.  Although he had as much ego as anyone else, he knew how to succeed, and that meant helping his people to succeed in any way possible.  After a few years managing the group, the powers that be tapped him to become the youngest VP in company history.  Because they, too, recognized how important the individual successes on a team are.

More than anything else I have learned in my career, I have held on to this.  Success comes double when you create the environment for your staff to shine.  A manager is part counselor, mediator and facilitator, not a traffic cop.