&gt; The first is an insulation between the team and and the outside world. Your &quot;problem solvers&quot; aren&#x27;t going to get anything done if they spend their entire days negotiating with clients or fielding reqs from other departments.<p>This is exactly the role of a secretary.<p>&gt; Secondly, a good manager acts as a focusing lens for the team. This allows the individual member to concentrate on any given technical problem without needing to expend the bandwidth to constantly come back to how their piece needs to work into the bigger picture.<p>This is exactly the problem: technical problems will never be solved well unless you <i>are</i> constantly coming back to how each piece needs to fit into the bigger picture. Contrary to your belief, any half-decent programmer is quite capable of doing this. And managers who try to prevent programmers from doing this are literally preventing programmers from doing their job. This is why programmers do things like present an almost-correct solution to the problem so the manager can feel like they&#x27;ve &quot;acted as a focusing lens for the team&quot; to get the last part of the problem. And that&#x27;s a moderately decent-case scenario for your hypothetical &quot;focusing lens manager&quot;; the more common case is that this manager focuses on the wrong thing entirely because they don&#x27;t know what a computer is capable of.