Many people take recommendation letters from their bosses/managers. This can be a good idea, especially if your manager can vouch for your sincerity and technical prowess. The idea is to reflect that you remained committed to excellence at work, and came up with innovative ideas and results. Though academic recommendation letters are also very important, but if you have been working for 1 year or more - then taking a recommendation from your manager/tech lead would not be a bad idea. Here is an example of a sample recommendation letter written by a manager for a prospective candidate. This sample has been crafted from a real recommendation letter for a particular student. So the names of the people and the company have been changed.

I know Vijay Patil as a Software Engineerfor a year in the Software
Development Team at SUN Software India (Private) Limited, Bangalore. In my
capacity as the Technical Architect for the Network Throughput Management Software
Product he has worked with me for the past year. Vijay is enthusiastic, committed
and very sharp and is one person who can be relied upon to solve difficult problems.
He is ranked among the top 1% employees of the entire network management team.
Vijay has an impeccable record at work. After joining fresh from college, he
rapidly acquired domain knowledge in the networking domain and web
technologies. He has since driven three modules to completion and has shown
excellent application and drive in completing the tasks. The projects included a
complex visualization of the logical and physical view of the Network Load
and this has been appreciated by all customers. During the course of these projects,
Vijay has emerged as very sincere, a good team player and someone who completes
all the tasks on time.
Vijay writes solid and stable code. He learnt to code in AJAX Web Toolkit in
less than a week, which successfully scaled up to the product requirements. Vijay
provides several valid data points for any problems that make decision making easy.
He certainly exceeded the expectations of being a valedictorian at his college.
Apart from work, Vijay goes the extra mile to learn and experiment with new
technologies. He has worked with me on two patents in the Network Reliability space that
deals with tracing and diagnosing faults in the network. Vijay is a
matured individual with lot of self-initiated actions. He came up with quite a few new
product ideas, which added business value. He is highly proficient in English and has
commendable communication skills. He took an active part in giving presentations on
new technologies and played a leading role in organizing the SUN Social Initiative programs.
Overall I have found Vijay to be brilliant, sincere and hard working. He has a
very strong grasp of fundamentals and an astute and discerning approach towards
problem solving. For his intelligence, emotional maturity and perseverance, I would
rate him among the top 1% of all the engineers I have come across during the past 7
years.