At one point Waffle House required all of its senior executives to spend time each year working on the line. (They probably still do I just haven't checked in a few years). They feel this is important for their management team to more viscerally understand the lived experiences of the people working, identify issues in their processes and technology, and generally foster team spirit among their staff.

Would it? I understand your point, but the counterpoint is that the leaders are in a position to make big changes if something is broken. They could attempt to push some simple change and see glaring process and onboarding problems, which nobody has been interested in prioritizing, and then make them top priority, saving everyone time.

The goal of that would not be to get functional code and a decent price, of course. The goal would be to ensure leadership has an accurate view of what that process is today.

Now, that may or many not achieve what the GP thinks it will. But, if you believe the leadership of your org is out-of-touch, it is a natural thing to suggest.

> a waste of company money Well, I wonder how the CEOs, VPs, and other top level people actually spend their time at work. I get that they obviously must be doing something Very Important And Useful[1], because otherwise it would be a supreme waste of company money to pay them for eating Business Lunches...

1 - https://nypost.com/2022/07/01/rotterdam-wont-dismantle-bridg...

As a counterpoint, in most of the Latin American family empires, where the eldest son is by birth designated to be the next CEO of the company, he usually starts working at the factory in childhood, doing all of the menial jobs. Then he's given a job like outbound sales rep and essentially has to "work his way to the top" (of course on an accelerated timeline, and without really needing to be the best at any level). That way by the time he is CEO, he has the credibility and knowledge of how every facet of the business works.

Yea, as an engineer I would not be happy with my CEO swooping in to commit some code then bugger off.

There is some value in technical leadership familiarizing themselves with internal processes. They could take on a small side project (do Google execs get 20% time?) using libraries and APIs with the goal of providing some feedback on what direction those tools should pursue. BillG did something like this with a measure of success.

I am actually writing a book saying exactly the opposite to this.

I think we are seeing the development of "Programmable Companies" - where all aspects of the company and its data are accessible (imagine a code API that reaches down to some sane mix of data structure).

So while it is crazy for Zuckerberg to try and optimise some Ad server, what should / could exist is a Jupyter-like notebook with something like

for minion in mycompany: if minion.timeatwork < 40: crapminions+= 1

This is mostly done with crappy spreadsheets, but it does not get to the feedback that this sort of platform (I think) enables.

Anyway. The point is CEOs should code. the reason they have stopped is because their job has not been "disrupted" ... yet

Edit: I think there is a further point here. Managers used to (Drucker?) design and build the systems, the factory floor was a battleground of Kanban and command and control. But automation won out. And now the "systems of production" are designed by coders.

All the managers have left is shuffling around people from project to project. But one lever does not a effective d means of control make.

We have learnt from communism that command and control economy falls over at scale. And what is a company but a command and control economy.