Comment by ericdykstra

There is a bit too much emphasis on the relationship between the manager and individual subordinates as the only thing a manager does. It's certainly the relationship that programmers have with their manager, but it ignores the reason why managers exist at all. In the end, managers are part of the translation layer between the company's top-level goal of acquiring customers and improving profitability and code that gets written and deployed.

The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.

The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.

How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.