The problem with the guidance/mentoring model of management is that it depends on your managers being consistently better than the people who report to them on the tech side and be competent at the art of management itself.
This is only workable if you're a startup that happens to have one of these rare people as founders and isn't planning on growing too much, or your company is among the most desirable place in the world to work.
The way it usually winds up working in practice is that you either promote your top tech people to their level of incompetence where they unhappily fail on the management side, or you hire competent managers who have to enforce a rather low tech competence ceiling in order to fit their command and control style.
Most developers aren't arrogant prima donnas, they want to learn from people who know more than them, but expecting someone to be able to mentor a projects' worth of people while also handling the regular management duties (hiring, delegation, oversight, resource allocation, communication with the execs, endless HR paperwork...) is setting someone up to fail.
This. I had a bad experience with a startup once in which I was the newest developer at a company and was working on a project that used a technology I was more experienced with than anyone else at the company. The whole situation did not do great things for my motivation.
This is only workable if you're a startup that happens to have one of these rare people as founders and isn't planning on growing too much, or your company is among the most desirable place in the world to work.
The way it usually winds up working in practice is that you either promote your top tech people to their level of incompetence where they unhappily fail on the management side, or you hire competent managers who have to enforce a rather low tech competence ceiling in order to fit their command and control style.
Most developers aren't arrogant prima donnas, they want to learn from people who know more than them, but expecting someone to be able to mentor a projects' worth of people while also handling the regular management duties (hiring, delegation, oversight, resource allocation, communication with the execs, endless HR paperwork...) is setting someone up to fail.