I had a boss who had no programming experience. Instead of writing allowing us to work on an algorithm design, he had us jump right into coding. Reasoning: watching us write code was the metric used to determine if we were working.
A manager of programmers must be a programmer in order to understand the steps required. To a manager who can not program, reducing the design time appears to increase productivity (more time at the keyboard).
In addition to asking how many bosses you'll have in the interview, also ask whether the immediate boss has been a programmer.