An unused sword rusts in its sheathe.
I remember working for a gent years ago, who was stressed out that my output was so low. He declared "I started this business in my living room let me show you I can do any job in this building"
He came to my workspace, where I had 20 servers stacked on my workbench. He looked at them. Attached a single power cord. And then wandered off telling me he could definitely do the work if he wanted to.
I dont think a manager of software engineers needs to code the application he manages, but he should be continually coding something to remain sharp.
TBH one of my current clients produces hardware and software, medium to large enterprise with close to 200 staff. Their CEO can operate all their products, operate the machines that place chips on the circuit boards, operate the injection moulding machines, write SQL queries to pull data out of their CRM and write code. He tries his best not to do it, but he maintains the skills. That's the goal I reckon. Someone who understands the job all the way to the top.
But you already do. Unless you're working for a tiny startup, your CEO or the Board probably doesn't understand the specifics of your code.
You can't run a large company by making every person super-involved in every detail. You have layers of abstraction that make it possible to reason about an org of hundreds or thousands of employees. The Board trusts the CTO to oversee technology. Your CTO trusts your director / VP / whatever to run a large chunk of it. That person delegates a smaller part of running the company to your boss.
The whole point of each layer is to abstract away some of the underlying messiness. They exercise professional judgment for day-to-day operations and provide a clean interface that provides health signals, requests resources as needed, etc. And I think what many folks miss is that it doesn't stop with their boss. It stops with you! Your boss generally trusts you to make design and implementation decisions and is expecting you to provide a reasonable interface to that. If your boss has a reasonably-sized team but is spending their day writing code, then honestly, why are they in a management position to begin with?
But I also dont want to (and currently dont have to) explain specific risks regarding what I do, I dont have to justify how long things take, because my management understands that. We speak the same language. Its glorious.
I mean just comparing my clients that have relevant technical knowledge, vs the ones that dont, the clients that dont have that knowledge need "meetings" and "catchups" and immense email threads in the order of 10 times the ones that do understand. Thats measurable (to me) waste.
Another observation of mine is that non technical people really have no ability to recruit and manage technical people. I have seen multiple businesses brought low because the "technical" person brought in to manage the "technical" side of the startup actually had NFI. Or when they do accidentally hire someone competant, their requests for resources or time are ignored, even when well justified. The non technical founder or CEO either has to trust someone (which fails a lot) or they dont trust someone (and thats even worse).
Most of us rarely interact with these people so it doesn't matter. They're just the newest placeholder name in the emails I get every few months as they're shuffled around.
From what I understand, Elon Musk previously spent his time on the line in Tesla.
They dont need to spend all day writing code, they need to spend their nights and weekends making sure their skills dont rust.
A better word might to 'appreciate' what you do. I'm mostly a manager/leader/vision person now and occasionally still code. Even though I've written a lot of code over the years, there's no way I could just drop in on a complicated project and understand all the intricacies without some ramp up right now. And that's ok. I appreciate the challenges everyone (engineering, customer support, operations, etc...) I manage faces and trust the people who do that work.
There is only so much time in the day, and if I'm tinkering with Node versions I'm not doing the work I need to get done.
The way I see it is that for a healthy office, you need to have peers who appreciate each other in a vocal way so that the managers/leads can hear it. Cause not everyone sees what you see. You notice someone is really good with something? See someone keeping up with the literature? Find a way to bring it up in group setting. It's not a given that everyone notices what you notice.
The thing about appreciation is that you can't just say it about yourselves. It always need someone else. You cannot say things about yourself other than your outputs cause it'd only look petty. Only when someone else says it, it's considered. Of course, be proper with it.
All I'm saying is appreciation is a shared responsibility. And if you do it right you might also become someone's favorite person.
Someone can understand what you do without being able to do it.
Where folks get objectionable (myself included) is when those same managers conflate superior rank with superior knowledge. It's the CIO demanding we use a specific product suite without objective justification, or the SVP forcing a given architecture because it suits their political objectives rather than organizational ones. That's presently on the rise as tech companies (in particular) bring in "outside talent" (aka, the same failed-upwards managers and leaders of unrelated enterprises in their social circles) instead of promoting from within or hiring qualified candidates, and it results in a whole host of grievances and problems that can rot the org from the inside out.
The clue is the rise of these sorts of posts, trying to coach us on how to step into leadership roles and transition from Individual Contributors to People or Product Managers instead. The takeaway I got was less "managers shouldn't code", and more "managers should not assume their code is better or necessary just because they're managers"; in other words, to strike a balance.
And if they have no clue what the job is about they will inevitably appreciate/promote/give raises to people who talk the most random jargon in meetings rather than to people who actually work.
I don’t learn plumbing in order to hire a plumber.
Most top level legendary CEOs, could. Zuckerberg, Gates, Jack Welch, Edison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin all worked their way up from the floor to the corner office.
>>At certain points things need to be let go of if you want to keep growing.
This is how you arrive at the situation Boeing is currently. Im sorry but not all businesses have a cookie cut text book way of running things. In fact running any business worth its salt will require you to know the skills at the floor level in a very deep sense.
But whoever the head of AWS is should definitely have a grasp of fundamentals.
> He came to my workspace, where I had 20 servers stacked on my workbench. He looked at them. Attached a single power cord. And then wandered off telling me he could definitely do the work if he wanted to.
Frankly, all this anecdote tells me is "don't behave like a condescending asshole". If he'd said the same thing but then managed to do some non-trivial aspect of your job for a few minutes, I think that would still have been a bad tactic. It's just as possible to have humility about skills you lack, and to lack humility about skills you've maintained.
The server stacks were well above his height.
He probably could have, in his day, wired up 20 odd desktops, got them going, and maybe shave 10 minutes off my batch time.
But he really had nfi with the servers, the stacks were 2ft higher than him already, they all had dual power supplies, lots of idrac ports. He absolutely would have shamed himself if he kept going. And the reason he hired me was the ability to reason and read vendor documentation.
They also take ages to boot compared to a desktop.
So yes I think ALSO dont behave like a condescending asshole, but if he understood what I was doing he wouldnt have needed to leave his office and make a fool of himself anyway.
Managers are responsible for maximizing what people they work with can achieve. This does not require them to be able to do what their team can do.
> I dont think a manager of software engineers needs to code the application he manages, but he should be continually coding something to remain sharp.
A counter to this is; a manager of software engineers needs to remove roadblocks impeding the success of the team.
Good managers enable their coworkers, micromanagers weigh in on or perform commits.
How do you performance manage employees if you dont understand what they do.
>>I dont think a manager of software engineers needs to code the application he manages, but he should be continually coding something to remain sharp.
I'd even go to the extreme of saying the coding skills/brains fade by inverse cube law. Skill =~ 1/t^3 (t = time since last practiced the skill). Musicians are known to say something along similar lines, like as little as a day of missed practice and they can feel it.
I used to be quite good at calculus as a teenager, and today I could look at the easiest problems there are and go blank. Only a faint echo of those days remains.
I have long suspected that Doctors suffer similar decline in ability as years go by from Medical school, and you can be sure in as little 2 - 5 years, most managers would struggle to imagine what writing code could look like.
Managers of engineers should be the interface to the business and other units within the organization. That's a big enough job without requiring coding skills on top of it.
An engineering manager actually reads the output of the engineers and participates in having it applied to realise bigger projects. He makes higher level decisions about the engineering projects.
However, his story goes, one day he was asked to design a telephony solution for a tech support call centre.
He fell in love with the call centre. He very quickly gained a deep understanding of what they were trying to achieve with the telephony solution and pulled a bunch of critical data out into a dashboard for them after learning how they operated.
He asked for a job and they gave him one. He was an effective manager because he had a deep understanding of the role of the 200 staff he managed, and was able to effectively spot issues with staff based on their metrics.
He could have done my job, but understanding it gave him the exceptional ability to add value to 200 staff at once. Neither of us was redundant.
Then you will never work for any human being. None of them will know what you do as well as you, unless they're doing it with you, and if that's the case, they're not really someone you work for.
Bosses become bosses because they want to stop doing the work. They want more money, and more respect, and they want to make decisions without needing to clean up their bad decisions. Bosses become bosses because they don't want to do what they've been doing.
There is no such thing as an engineer who does real work who is paid as much as a manager. They just don't exist in any company I have ever worked for. All managers of any pay grade automatically make more than any engineer of any pay grade, which creates a ceiling for engineers. Bosses become bosses because people are penalized for remaining engineers.
Management simply does not care about the experience and knowledge gained by engineers, and they value it less than a manager who is fresh out of college and who has zero experience with anything.
No, bosses should not code; they chose their path. Fuck 'em.
Why would you put a limit on your own progress like that?
I do agree that it's important for a coder to keep coding but mostly for the manager itself as it's removes some of the old biases and it's a continuous learning process on something that, technically speaking, they should be passionate about. Plus it does help to have conversations with other developers and don't sound like a person who only listens to vivaldi at a dnb concert.
1. Reducing dev friction.
When I had managers who coded they were ruthless about removing friction in the dev and deployment pipeline because they had to deal with it too. If build times went up, deployment infrastructure broke or someone’s PR broke dev they would roll it back immediately. If someone consistently blocks PRs the manager noticed the trend and would address it.
2. You get a much better sense of IC’s contributions by writing code.
There are ICs who play politics very well and sell themselves but that set is not the same as the ICs who deliver. If you are writing code you start to notice which ICs have written key features, built critical APIs or worked on hard problems because of comments and Git blame.
3. Understanding your codebase.
I hope most managers have solid CS and engineering fundamentals but that is a necessary but not sufficient condition to grasping the full picture. There’s a reason it takes time to ramp up to full productivity on a new codebase. If you work in the codebase and have had to use that one annoying but critical library or dealt with that tech debt from 2 years ago then you know what is hard and what isn’t. I’ve found when a codebase has a quirk that makes developing certain features hard all of the non-technical people keep forgetting why we can’t do that thing and all the technical people have it burned into their brains.
This is so important, my managers who didn't code pretended things weren't too bad and took a "just deal with it" attitude whenever I proposed going for a QoL improvement.
I'd draw an example of someone who hasn't used git before, making a choice between a git repo and managing code by keeping daily .zip files. Anyone (almost anyone) who is a career coder won't see a choice there.
That example is so basic I think most EM would get that right even if they didn't deal in code but the same dynamic turns up at every level of work. There are situations where there is a right option, the right option is obvious to everyone who is working on it and it is is a drain on the org when management gets confused and thinks that something that isn't an option is viable because they aren't on the ground working on it.
Some managers will do that. Most won’t. Given that, it’s easier to just tell them all to code.
It is like learning stuff from the book vs learning hands on. There is no book that will teach you skiing.
The same for working with the team - it is so much different than listening and trying to understand.
Everyone nags about how MBA graduates ruin everything by thinking that you can manage and it doesn’t matter who and what.
Oh lord we'd better hope they have absolutely IMPECCABLE git fu if they are going to be using this metric. Unfortunately here on HN I've seen people essentially brag that they only know just enough git to get by and "who cares if I don't know all the other commands deeply." In any event, this scenario REQUIRES that a manager know exactly how to determine who originally introduced something, or, exactly where it was significantly improved if they are going to be reading comments and blaming to see "who performs."
The very fact a manager might be doing this has got me a little worked up, mainly as I know great managers who don't do this and who are scared of something as simple as the reflog.
Like imagine you were a coding manager 10 years ago with AI experience. Sometime over the last 10 years your team does AI infra. You, as a manager and as an IC, have zero AI experience (you've never trained a model, never used a trained model, never using any of the various AI frameworks). Are you still okay to manage this team or should you be replaced with someone who does have that experience?
A movie director can see the sets with their own eyes. But you can't see the state of a software codebase without reading and understanding the code, and the most surefire way to do that is to try to write something, even just documentation.
You don't assess the state of your software by walking around the office and looking at hands on keyboards. You look at the codebase.
I don't know that much about movie making, but my understanding is that there would be managers and/or leads within each specialty, who are (among other things) managing the interaction between their specialty and the director / producers.
That seems pretty comparable to what's being discussed here.
Many directors started in other roles in the movie industry, typically as writers, PAs, or other subspecialties. Chad Stahelski was a stuntman and stunt coordinator before he started directing John Wick, and it really shows.
I think the clear distinction is between someone who understands a part of the job, and someone who is good at part of the job. If you don't understand how costuming works, as a director, you're going to have a hard time getting good costumes, but by no means does that mean you're able to pinch hit in that role. I personally believe that it's difficult to replace hands on experience as a way to truly understand something.
In software engineering, I think there's a huge gap between managers who worked in some other industry and transferred over, versus having previously been an engineer, even a mediocre one. Knowing how the sausage is made is hard to replace.
For me a good manager is a facilitator, not a leader. Someone who removes obstacles for us. Whether they themselves are affected or not. Someone only fixing an issue because they have to deal with it too seems like a pretty bad manager to me.
They're not for pushing targets or trying to weed out non-performance, I don't work at a playschool. My manager is there to make sure I can do my job and that I can reach my maximum potential (including making sure I'm in the right job)
I think a good manager should be able to take a swing with the axe to get a feel for its sharpness.
Obviously a good manager might pitch in, understand their teams capabilities but it's not always a natural transition for senior devs moving to management.
you need to keep your hand in the game just to understand what's going on with the codebase. but you're not an a-list player here.
Yep agreed - I've seen a couple of managers that were probably fine as developers but struggled (to their extreme detriment) with being pretty average compared to the senior developers that they were managing. Their 'helpful advice' just served to show how superficial their understandings of the systems were.
But that a manager should always code is not something i found helping the team or the manager - all the time. One size does not fit all. In startups yes frankly there is hardly a need for a manager and it is TL, TPM, EM role combined into one.
In larger cos though a most managers are innundated with all kinds of non technical work (meetings, alignment, perf management, product discussions etc). While having coded before is a great thing keeping uptodate is actually robbing the manager of time for all other things on the plate (and those actually benefit the team beyond what meets the eye).
Besides at large orgs there is also so much technical (think large scale design and integrations) knowledge that a manager needs to keep track of which also needs time investment.
Then there are various level/career related things that necessitate one or more TLs a manager needs to work with or manage and coding often gets seen as a manager "not doing their job" or worse stealing a junior engineers opportunities.
There's a lot more that is very environmental but hope sets some context.
Second: If their ass is on the line, then they DO get a bigger say. They are paid for seeing potential problems, guiding the team, among other things.
An engineering manager's job is: take long-term ownership for the performance of the team. That might include aligning with leadership, marketing your team's work internally, hiring, performance management, team bonding, planning, retros, oncall coverage etc. etc, although sometimes you'll have a PM/tech lead/HR contact who handle some of these.
Every now and then, your bottleneck really is just writing more code (more common in smaller companies). In that case, jump in.
You're characterising it as pure "code volume" question but it's completely not the point. Absolutely if they are coding just to directly increase the output of the team they are much better devoting that time to getting more output from the IC's they are managing.
But even better is coding in a way that helps the team overall work better. This can be because they do architectural work, they gain insight into the actual team challenges, it improves how they can estimate the time needed for different tasks, etc.
I think of it as the management control loop: "I have some spare cycles -> what is the most important work I can do for the team right now?" Coding can be the answer. But some people's control loop seems to be more like: "I have some spare cycles -> what is the most interesting/rewarding task I can do next?" The latter might lead to a lot more coding, but it's not good for the team.
The worst possible scenario is that a manager doesn't know how to prioritize amongst their existing team, and/or doesn't want to say a difficult 'no' and tries to make up for it by coding in the evenings. That's someone who hasn't learned how to really fly the airplane yet.
This is a rather naive, mid-level management-style take.
The real EM job is to represent the team to the company, to be aligned with company priorities, and to be a backstop for the team. In other words, being the leader - the face, the prioritize, and the helper of the team.
Performance-style nonsense is what is used in warehouses and factories where the manager is responsible for number of units produced.
But in software, the goal is NOT to produce more but to produce correct/investigate correct/and maintain correct.
As such, EM is very different from warehouse-style management.
However, to be clear, software teams, engineers, and engineering managers are absolutely evaluated on their performance, which is a complex and subjective metric, and the manager is generally the one held responsible for it at the team level.
That's quite a confusing description. Then what does the team lead do? Manage the team?
I ran into this problem years ago. It's not exactly good form to be manager that contributes to the team's project, is at the apex of code review, and is responsible for team performance reviews, all at the same time. It can work, but without other people at your level reviewing your work, you'd be asking the team you manage to call out your mistakes. That's the kind of thing that a lot of people might not be comfortable with, so you're really asking for softball and rubber-stamp reviews on your work. This makes for poor optics: your work always goes to `main` virtually unchallenged, while everyone else has a harder time.
At the same time, you need to be technically competent if you're managing a team while in the review loop. To do otherwise is to create situations where you will lose face with your team. So, sticking to review only is probably the best answer here.
There are workarounds though. It makes sense to maintain a pet automation project just to stay sharp while solving real problems (e.g. every manager needs better reporting). You can also negotiate out cross-team contributions where your work may be reviewed by folks that do not report to you.
It's that old quote - better to keep silent and be thought possibly a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. If your job isn't primarily coding, and you parachute in to "help out" and end up making more work than you save, that burns a lot of goodwill that you can't really get back. You're not some junior dev that's going to get better with mentorship.
- Write and design your packets (if in a corporation), or your career path (if in a smaller company)
- Align with other teams, get consensus, shield you from politics beyond your level.
- Make long term planning and making sure your team and neighboring teams follow it.
- Listen to you and your colleagues and handle conflicts.
EDIT: forgive me for not reading TFA first. I won't change my comment as it aligns very well with the article. I still think that the answer to the "should code" question is no, not maybe... Let's not try to overload and overcomplicate what "coding" means.
I think eng managers should rely on their ICs to inform them of what is going on, and the manager should be the advocate for IC dev needs. Devs should be able to tell their manager what the pain points engineering is experiencing and the manager should advocate on behalf of their team.
Why spend time being good at something you don't care about being good at any more?
It is purely a personality thing however for me I would like to continue moving up the career ladder and you rarely see CTOs, VpEng rolling up their sleeves and sifting through CloudWatch logs. I want my focus to be on working the skills associated with those roles.
As a people manager that works with many incredibly capable engineers that are aspiring to be managers, I share with them this advice, 'excellent engineers compound their value by making other engineers excellent. It's far more difficult to do that when you are writing code.'
They did know how to code. It just wasn't their job anymore.
Is your environment too complicated to set up? Is the process of deploying something too onerous, and you'll still be trying to get it into production by this time next week? Do you not have any easy bugs to work on, and is that because they all get fixed or just because nobody's recording and triaging them? Is your tech stack too complicated for an infrequent contributor to understand?
These are all really important things to know! And you would know them if you tried to write some code! Any code at all, written at any frequency less than a year apart, would help understand your team.
At a smaller company, a manager of a small-ish team might not have enough meetings and planning work to fill the workweek.
I’ve been at small and medium companies where managers were hired from big companies and felt obligated to keep their calendars full. They would invent new meetings, come up with new ideas, and churn the roadmap to fill the time and look like they were doing something. It was depressing.
I wish managers would understand that it's not their job to do that any more - I've had a few technical managers in my time and the best one was totally hands off, except when he recognised a scenario that had caused him grief in the past (e.g. boolean fields in a database or anything completely over-engineered). The other ones have just rapidly descended into "I'm the manager therefore my opinion is final" (including one who had never worked with Java, PHP, MySQL, serverless or AWS but didn't let it stop him from having strongly held technical opinions).
The reason managers should code is more so that they maintain familiar with the state of the codebase. There's no particular output rate required for this, they don't even need to merge their changes, but they should be getting their hands dirty and making sure they still know how the pieces fit together.
I wouldn't trust a long term plan from someone with their head in the clouds. They have to be able to see the ground to draw a roadmap.
If they close a few tickets here and there, that's just icing on the cake.
TFA says the manager should be in the code but not necessarily writing code. I disagree. The only way to be in the code is to write it, even if you throw away what you write. I agree with TFA that the manager should not be in the critical path (unless there's some sort of crisis). But I don't think they can keep current in the state of the code by just reviewing PRs, unless they're a real coding genius.
ppl here always say "politics" is just learning to work with other people. So your manager is shieding you from working with other ppl ?
That's not "working with other people" - that's office politics.
- Other director comes and says: why should we work with your team instead of rolling out the same product ourselves (and getting your team laid off)?
- Our director comes and says: your team is too slow, why? You should do X instead of Y. Z Is super urgent: cancel your plans and do it.
- Other manager: my team is better than your team! My people deserve a raise/promo/whatever more than yours.
If you're at a giant company, the answer is likely no, there's enough politicing and paperwork where the highest impact thing to be done by a manager is likely not coding.
If you're at a startup / smaller more nimble org in a big company, the answer is likely yes, if you've gotten to the point where you're a manager, in theory you're a very good engineer and you should spend your time coding, but on things that aren't on critical path. Bug backlog, experimental things with no hard deadlines, proof of concepts, all of these are valuable things. Leading from the front is also just generally good with smaller groups.
Also under discussed by people having these debates (typically managers), is not acknowledging how bad most managers are at coding, especially if their job hasn't required them to code in a while. I see all the time that managers look for any excuse not to code, because it would reveal to their team that they're at best an L4 level coder after being in management for 5-10 years.
If you’re a manager at a big company with a project that intersects with 5 other teams and you have a dozen people who call themselves stakeholders for your work, you’re not going to have any time to code.
If you’re a manager at a small company where everyone knows each other and team sizes are small, there might be something wrong if your calendar is full of meetings.
I’ve been at a couple small companies that hired big company managers. They felt obligated to create more meetings, documents, and discussions to fill their time and look busy. We finally had to start screening for managers who knew how to fill their time with something productive, whether it’s coding or going out and working with customers.
Generating meetings until your calendar is full is a game in itself at a lot of companies.
It varies a lot with context. Manager isn't even a well-defined term.
The worst managers I've ever had were the so-called "technical" managers who had never looked at the code. They were often involved in technical decisions, but their opinions were entirely based on vibes. Since they were a manager, people felt obliged to listen to their input, even if it was disconnected from reality.
Either: a) be completely non-technical, and make sure you have a technical leader on the team who you trust, who does know the code or b) get involved in the code, enough to support and unblock your team.
It's a shame that the "maturation" of the tech industry has resulted in these non-coding eng managers whose main skillset is often bullshitting, managing up, or both.
But... keeping your hands in the mix elsewhere helps you stay informed and make better decisions. I found writing things like internal debugging tools, documentation, helping out on code review and architectural discussions, building example features against APIs etc were all good uses of my time.
An interesting trend I've observed over the past couple of years is that a lot of my friends who had moved into engineering management and stopped coding completely are picking up more coding tasks now thanks to LLMs - previously spending ~4 hours getting a development environment working and getting back up to speed wasn't justifiable, but LLM assistance means they can now get something small and useful done in just an hour which is much easier to carve out time for.
A hobby project to keep current isn’t a bad idea, though.
That's a very good indicator of a bloated institution. People have to compete for work instead of pushing it away or avoiding it because they already have their hands full.
But I don't believe there is a general rule that applies here.
Most great managers I had were deeply technical and involved in the nitty gritty of the projects, including coding the very spiky aspects of a project.
Most mediocre managers I had were very focused on relationship building. The kind of manager that would need a hobby project to keep current, instead of being the most knowledgeable person in the room.
> I think that there is a big difference between being in the code and writing code. All managers should be in the code, but not all managers should be writing code.
I think it's not possible to be in the code without writing code. People can pay lip service to being in the code as the author indicates, but as we all know there is no substitute for actually sitting down and writing the code yourself in terms of understanding the actual pains and struggles.
And my anecdotal experience says that if you aren't writing at least some of the code, more often than not the disconnect between the manager and what the team is doing grows and grows.
If I were an IC and my boss was picking the sexy work I would leave. If I was a director and one of my EMs was picking the sexy work I would fire them.
I’ve also done POCs of work that has been met with resistance that I didn’t feel was justified in order to actually give it a fair shake. That is my coding fun.
I've had managers do this to me. What an awful experience. Because they're the manager you can't push back against the awful design decisions they made. They feel it's almost done so don't understand that it takes a lot of time to deal with all the side effects they didn't consider.
Then again, I've been called a bad manager on Hacker News so...
Obviously being a good manager is first and foremost, but I’ve always had more respect for managers that I know can (even if they never do) do my job as well as bring a manager. Early in my career at a startup I had a manager that was both and excellent manager and right there in the trenches with you when issues arose or business deadlines were approaching. The amount of respect I still have for that individual is immeasurable and I’d go work for them again in a heartbeat if they asked.
How many organizations do you think check all those boxes and are willing to do that? It's not many.
Please no! Most managers want to increase output and engineers are aware of that. It is exceptionally frustrating when your manager tells you during your 1:1 that they want to help move things along and then does quite literally the opposite in a PR.
If you must dive deep into a PR, get the PR unblocked and then follow up with the change. Or stop telling your direct reports that you want to help unblock them.
But I don't think a manager necessarily needs to be at this level of detail.
Although this is true; if the manager is thinking about and getting involved in architecture after the PR is written it does suggest something has gone wrong. If there are architectural considerations then it is good to discuss them with the coder before they start developing.
PR review is a great time to pick up subtle bugs, do last-line sanity checks or get used to someone's style but if they are a bad arena for combating most code issues. If they are picking up design problems there is probably a process flaw to be corrected.
Recording a video seems excessive to me. No one has the time or desire to watch me bloviate about something that I could say in a few PR comments that can be quickly skimmed.
Either no is doing this research or no one trusts the conclusions.
Other topics like this are WFH or RTO, 4 day WW or 6 day WW. We as a profession seem to never come to a consensus.
I think this is why you see a lot of herd behavior amongst companies. Some business leader who feels they just have an intuitive sense of what's best just tries something. Are they right? Who knows? But if the company does OK it is evidence the policy isn't a total disaster so more companies follow suit.
Summary: Managers who know how to manage, but don't know how to do anything are not the best managers. The best managers are the great individual contributors who never ever wanna be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.
The skillset you need for management are different from those you need as an IC
These are the best managers, because they have the disposition/skills to be a good manager, but also aren't going to make dumb engineering decisions.
IC's who become reluctant managers are generally terrible managers because it's not what they're good at and not what they enjoy.
But if you're looking to evaluate your manager, or hire managers who can retain great people, maybe not the best advice.
I think managers gain at doing some coding to stay in touch, and certainly home projects are very useful. But it is impractical to expect anyone who runs a large team to be productive in term of writing code.
"Should they be able to do code reviews? Yes."
There is no standard answer here. At many companies it is the Head Of Product who also oversees the tech team. They may not know how to write code, and will not know how to do code reviews. Some project managers lead engineering teams without knowing how to code. That's especially true outside of the tech industry.
For anyone interested in specific numbers, I interviewed Eric Garside about his experience scaling Freshly from 3 engineers to almost 80 engineers, see here:
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/eric-garside-as-...
I also surveyed several of the CTOs who I know in New York City, about team size and scale and responsibilities, they gave their answers here:
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos...
I have experience: project management, real life, edge cases, dealing with C-levels and customers, risk mitigation, being calm when sh*t hits the fan, mentoring, etc. These are things the team benefits from far more than my fingers typing away.
At the same time, if I’m actually doing my job well, I really don’t have time to code.
I also want my team (senior and junior) to have a feeling of ownership. The company has goals and directives, but what’s being built belongs the team, not me. All the successes are theirs, and the failures are mine alone.
When do my fingers hit the keyboard? When there’s a time crunch (if I’m not willing to work more how can I ask the team to?), when the team is having a difficult time with a particular problem, or maybe when there’s some downtime and I can fix a few outstanding bugs or work on something extremely isolated (I never want to get halfway through something and then have to hand it off to the team).
Background: I used to be a developer and have managed developers. Now I work in info sec and manage info sec.
Longer answer: this question has been discussed throughout my career.
(1) Does it help for a manager to understand what a team does and needs to do? Absolutely yes. Some managers can do this without domain experience but it's a lot harder for them and the team.
(2) Should a manager keep doing what their team does? Probably not. I can actually do most of what my team does faster and better, but they need to learn to do it. I don't scale. I can mentor them, and if there's a need for more resource I can get it for them.
Edit: I do actually still write code - but just in my own time because I enjoy it.
But as a manager, there's a whole category of things that only you can effectively do, because the social environment and power structures are set up that way. In that context, coding is a distraction for a manager. Writing code often takes a lot of mental energy and stays in your head even when you're not at the keyboard.
I don't want my manager getting nerd sniped when they should be coaching a struggling colleague, advocating to upper management, having a tough conversation with a toxic team member, or reigning in the PM.
Back at my first salary job, the CTO of the company would occasionally jump into the code base to write some code when everyone else was busy .
It was a very small startup, but seeing him do that motivated me to work harder. It was also just a very awesome thing for him to do, since he could have just said no I have to go pick up a pie this evening figure it out .
Below him, the best manager I've ever had, was regularly writing large amounts of the core code base. In my opinion this is really good for team morale. If you want to call yourself a startup, this is how things should be done .
When I think about it, I really would only like to work for startups with around 50 people or less, or mega corporations. I don't particularly like the quasi 1,000 person start up with 800 rules, and a lack of stable funding.
I understand most people have negative experiences with managers that can't code, but I would argue that the experience with these managers would also be bad if they could code.
You don't need to be able to code as a manager but you need to be highly skilled.
The only problem that arises then is that for decisions based on technical knowledge you have to trust others.
The main problem I see is that a lot of managers are too mediocre for the job and compensate it by trying to sell themselves.
Managers should not be evaluated based on code output -- it's not their job. However, writing code here and there -- to evaluate new technologies, make a rough prototype, or demonstrate a technique to be adopted by individual contributors -- may aid them in their management responsibilities and should be embraced when it does.
I've seen what happens when a manager is also responsible for individual coding duties. He ended up with roughly twice the work, shifting between two mutually incompatible mental modalities all the time, cranky with his subordinates and making a lot of sad phone calls to his fiancée explaining that he'd be late home from work, again. Not a good fate for any worker, even if the pay and prestige are better.
Since 2023, most roles I reviewed or interviewed for were player/coach roles, often close to 50/50 split. In my last EM role, I was hired for exactly this.
I found very few EM roles that are primarily managing with only "being in the code"; I can count on my hands out of hundreds of Engineering Manager roles. Probably closer to 95% or more EM roles require hands-on technical work similar to Tech Lead roles.
- You need to understand the work to evaluate your team
- You need to understand the work to prioritize and rank what's important
- You need to understand the work to know which roles to hire for
- Good developers typically don't want to have a non-technical engineering manager
- The budget for a non-contributing team member reduces your budget for engineers
- It creates a more hierarchical and less flat org chart, which creates communication scaling challenges
I would only consider non-technical managers for companies with large budgets and a non-technical product. Not only should they be technical, they should be excellent.
I have had managers with no concept of what's going on the codebase, and those were dysfunctional development teams that produced poor results, despite great communication and productive meetings.
I have had managers that were effectively another engineer on the team, and those were dysfunctional development teams that produced decent results, but had poor interaction with stakeholders and no unified direction.
As in many things, the ideal seems to be a happy medium. Someone who can read the code, who can write the code, and is interested in both, but whose duties are not primarily to do so.
I say this as someone who has been in both roles!
- Hiring and retaining great people.
- Owning the team's strategy and roadmap, and ensuring efficient execution.
- Making decisions to ensure that the team is working on the right things and saying no to the things that don't matter.
- Dealing with fires, escalations, and other crises that pop up all of the time.
- Building a strong culture within the team so that people are engaged, challenged, and motivated.
- Mentoring and coaching your reports so they get better and can have more work delegated to them, thus increasing output further.
- Managing the team's stakeholders so they can offer their steer to the team early and often.
- Actively performance managing the team so that superstars can continue to shine and underperformers can be coached or exited.
- Building close working relationships with other teams so that smooth collaboration happens across the organization, leading to a better and more cohesive product.> It depends on the manager, the team, and the organization. As a senior leader, I would rather my managers be in the code as per the above list, but not necessarily putting themselves in the critical path by writing code, given that they are likely to be interrupted more often, have more meetings, and be pulled in more directions than their reports.
It was a terrible mistake for me. So much of my value as a manager was being understand what the engineers were doing. I am not a great programmer but I can do it, and I could usually understand what an engineer was trying to do from looking at their check ins rather than listening to them in stand ups. I was just not that useful. There were times when the team was doing things that I knew I had seen done before with much better before with different methods, but just talking about it was relatively ineffectual.
Therefore it is to everyone's benefit that I don't touch code. I do sometimes put on an engineering hat and help with brainstorming how we will build new things, or asking questions about open issues that no one has asked, but that is the extent I will get involved in engineering. I try to only get involved when it's something where my decades of experience will add a lot of value.
And historically all the best managers I ever had were the same -- former engineers who could understand everything we were talking about, but did not get involved in coding or code reviews.
Your manager should never be a blocker to getting things done.
Every single time without fail that I have had a manager who still tries to be an active contributor, one of two things happen.
Either they never keep their commitments as a coder because they are spending too much time on their management duties including meetings, manhole up, and career development for their reports or they are horrible managers who don’t or can’t do what I need from them as a manager - get me the resources I need to do my job, play politics and manage up and especially fight for raises.
Directors manage multiple supervisors and own a complete function. They are like colonels. They don’t code as their job is aligning with senior management and across teams/divisions/organizations. It’s political.
Larger companies subdivide this more.
Our managers did not write code, nor would they have been better managers if they did, IMO. They represented the team to the wider company, they facilitated communication across teams, kept us informed of changing goals and priorities, etc. Basically helped everybody row in the same direction.
The article suggests managers should focus several tasks that depend on the ability to code, but not produce code themselves. I think that's not sustainable. When a manager stops producing code, their skills in that area begin to deteriorate. I've seen it happen several times. When you stop coding, you'll eventually start missing crucial things in code review, make very poor estimations of labour involved, and assign the wrong team members to tasks. It won't happen immediately, but it will happen within 5 years.
I think a better way is to keep producing code, but at a lower rate. If the project you're working down doesn't permit low-commitment development, start developing tooling or pick up a side project. A coach doesn't need to be a top-player in the coding field, but they do need to remain fit.
A big problem I had with some managers who didn't code was that they sometimes had wild expectations. They were also not good mentors. They couldn't really teach you much of anything because their job was so distinctly different from what you were doing.
- It's dangerous for the manager's career to lose the ability to code. After five years they will have regressed nearly to a Jr engineer's ability and would need significant effort to get back into interviewing shape. I've interviewed so many managers who didn't like management or aren't quite good enough to stay in the management track who can't even remember how an if statement works.
- Small companies and early startups are much more likely to need engineers over politicians, so the manager working on engineering is much more helpful in smaller teams.
In my experience in all pretty small companies, keeping hands on the keyboard was essential for me and the team. This was great because I got tired of being a manager and wanted to go back to pure engineer again.
The meta question here is do you need a person to manage you or can you perform at your peak without being micro managed. If so, you might be management material ;-).
I've worked as a employee, freelancer, consultant and lately as a CTO. As a consultant you tell managers how to manage. When freelancing you don't lift a finger unless you are told by your client, who is not your manager (important to be able to tell the difference). If you start consulting them effectively, make sure you increase your rates.
If you are an employee, you might have a career path that may involve you evolving into a manager. And as a CTO of a small company it's my job to make sure shit gets done. And sometimes that means getting hands on and leading by example. And sometimes that means delegating work and optimizing my time use. And sometimes I like having some fun. I hate delegating fun things.
A CTO that isn't hands-on is not a CTO and cannot provide long term meaningful technical leadership. Any technical skills they have don't have a long shelf life. Companies with no CTO and a hands off VP of engineering are probably not technology companies. This is a problem if they are trying to be one. Or used to be one.
I've consulted a few of those. I've also advised startup founders to not hire a CTO and instead find themselves a good VP of engineering. Because they weren't creating a tech company and their technical staff was OK but clearly not management material. In a startup, CTO is a founding role. A tech lead reports to the VP of engineering, a CTO reports to the CEO. Or sometimes is the CEO as well. Big difference. The VP of engineering is not a C level executive typically. They aren't co-founders. They don't hold a lot of equity. Good CTOs that can double being a decent VP of engineering are rare. Very different skill sets. The opposite is more common.
In short, it all depends.
Tech is in constant flux. While the basics rarely change, and yes, there is a lott of reinventing the wheel in programming approaches, thongs do progress and you feel your grasp weakening.
So now I code again. Not daily, but enough to complete some projects on my own. It feels great, and it definitly has a positive impact on my overall capabilities.
I know most people will say yes but many will argue they don't need to actually do it to have that knowledge. But my experience is that with software and IT, things just move too fast for that. Managers need to continuously stay active at some level to keep up to date enough to make reasonable decisions from a management perspective. Of course it always depends what you mean by "manager", if you just want someone to approve leave, check on project status and organise birthdays, farewells and christmas celebrations .... well yeah you are wasting someone who can code on that.
You should also keep using programming and automation to perform managerial tasks and not degenerate into constantly droning away in some mind-numbing office software suite.
We got along better before all these managers arrived, could ship huge projects with 100 people and one ceo. And the ceo wrote code and didn't do any of the nonsense most managers fill their days with.
If you can’t code, and you can’t get a manager role, you’re in trouble.
Are you proposing that they do coding on the side after they get off of work? I have a strict policy of “no side work” and I have since graduating from college in 1996. When I get off work, I don’t think about computers again until I go back to work the next day.
I’m not a manager. But I am now a “staff software architect” working full time at a third party cloud consulting company after pivoting from software development and doing a previous stint working at AWS in the consulting department (full time direct hire - AWS Professional Services).
My specialty is supposedly developing applications using AWS services. But as I moved up I find myself doing no coding.
My job is half working with sales and being the first technical contact for a customer and writing long and detailed requirement documentation and getting the customer to sign the contract for us to do the work. The other half is as a tech lead coordinating between the customer, project manager, sales, and the subject matter experts on our side who lead/implement the various “work streams” (development, data, cloud architecture, etc).
First issue, when I was looking for a remote job last year and the year before as a developer as a plan B job, every opening had hundreds of applications and I heard crickets. This has never happened to me and I looked for software development jobs in 1999, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018. The job at AWS fell into my lap in 2020.
It’s a shit show out there right now for software development jobs especially remotely. Did I mention I was looking for regular old enterprise Dev jobs?
On the other hand for differentiated strategic cloud consulting jobs, I had no problem getting offers quickly.
A manager able to give their team programmatic tests to pass brings a level of precision which makes it much easier for them to know when the work is done.
If managers communicate requirements in the form of acceptance tests more often, then the problem of projects running over time and over budget will occur significantly less often, because there will be clear finish lines for dev teams to run towards and cross, and reproducible pass/fail outcomes to inspire confidence.
I don't want to spend my time managing my manager. He thinks I'm an idiot because I can't follow his simple instructions and I think he's naive and ready to fire me. Bad for all of us!
Strong no from me on (2). Production coding takes tiime and focus and would eat into manager’s management work.
On the other hand, managers at all levels should actively engage with the output of their org. For the direct manager of a development team, that means periodically running the build, maybe coding on weekends (which I do) to explore ideas and prototypes, etc.
The ideal is to try and structure code in such a way that it "screams" about what is going on, but realizing that ideal in some contexts is extremely difficult.
Yes, because in a downturn managers get cut first and you never know when you will need to be an IC again.
It's my belief that any engineering manager worth their salt should push back on this and argue for a seat at this table, every single time. I don't want to work for someone who is disinterested in new functionality in codebases under their purview.
I need them to then trust me to accomplish the objectives myself on smaller implementations or to lead the team on larger implementations.
I also found that I could never schedule myself into the critical path. Most of my coding was open-source stuff, on my own time.
i like the analogy of a sports team coach for being a manager. You can motivate, cheer, train, and drive the team to victory but you can't step on the field.
Intimate knowledge is what makes a boss better, not by itself alone.
Have to continually sharpen the scissors (mind) and not just the boss'.
Conway's Law is real.
Great engineers are not just "pure programmers", they understand the scale and organization of their domain. Similar for managers.
In joking terms, the 8th OSI layer is "money/politics".
- Managers who came from the trench and can guide us through the mist;
- Managers who know nothing about the trench but leave us alone;
I think managers are often out of touch with what the team puts up with.
Over the course of about two years this drove me to mental issues. I was unhappy, I could not have a technical discussion with people working for me, I felt inadequate and dumb. On a practical level, I was expected to make technical decisions, but couldn't, because all I had was poorly communicated information from people working for me. That is not enough!
I realized two things:
1. It is not possible to do technical management without coding yourself. CTOs that don't code are not good CTOs.
2. I never want to be in a work situation where I am away from coding.
Since then I've been very happy, first co-founding a business where I had a CTO role (and coded), and then solo-founding and running a business where I code all the time.
Anyone in a people leadership role has to have a political mindset. You simply cannot be technically oriented and politically oriented at the same time. This is not a negative, the human brain, generally speaking, can't focus on two unrelated priorities at the same time.
I have had a highly negative experience over this. When resolving technical conflicts, you expect technical merit and reasoning to be used. But managers who also meddle in technical affairs use political leverage and tactics to see their desired technical outcome. This is a very unpleasant and toxic affair overall.
Imagine trying to solve a bug, but your manager wants a specific work around implemented which will result in bigger problems down the road. If you disagree with your manager, your performance review will suffer, you will be called disagreeable, hard to work with,etc.. You are only considering the best course of action from a technical perspective. Your technical peers can also review your code and reasoning and you can debate in a civilized manner over the technical merits of the issue. But as soon as a manger is involved, things will get toxic fast. It is nearly impossible to avoid micromanagement as well.
Especially if the manager really knows what they're talking about. Then they'll really be looking over everyone's shoulders and causing drama.
It is such a disorienting thing, having to fight political drama over simple and straightforward matters. This is how I learned what gaslighting is! I would be reaching out to people I consider a lot smarter than myself, asking their opinion on the subject (and they'd mostly agree with me), because I legitimately got disoriented and doubted everything I knew.
I really hope none of you experience this. At least when someone is being mean/toxic for other reasons you can explain it away, but when they use their technical expertise, that's a whole new level.
The whole concept of your management trusting you with the details and expecting you to show result goes out the window this way.
I think your experiences sound like a case of a very bad coworker, whether manager or not.
I don't want a manager who knows nothing about the applications and the architecture. I have no desire to punch a clock and be coddled with public mentions and work parties. I want to work with people (including my manager) who want to solve problems together, and solve them the right way.
There may be problems that arise because my manager is busy trying to do technical work but I'll take that any day over a manager who can barely speak the same domain-specific language, constantly gets facts wrong, gets upset as a result of their misunderstandings, applies arbitrary deadlines and expectations, and calls for endless status requests in the midst of all this. No thanks.
Oh and forget any kind of technical direction! Because your manager is forced to accept what people tell them, it becomes a free-for-all where the programmer with the biggest ego wins.
And yes, I too am essentially just describing a hypothetical bad coworker. There are probably some great managers out there who are ignorant of the technology. (Ugh.) But I will put my money on 'technically proficient' or 'involved in the code' every single time.
But then there were some small non-essential projects that would have been complete distraction for the team.. so i took one, then another. In nodejs which isn't my cup of tea - so even better, learned some things the hard way. Though.. lucky they were rarely needing support, or it would have become a chore.
Then, one day, the company was acquired, and.. i am not a CTO anymore, but a (tech and also non-tech) Lead of some future greenfield project, ~re-factor with diff.goals. So here we go - research, architect, code, hire, discuss, demo, eh.. usual tiny-startup thing - except that the politiking and the now-everyday-a-new-policy chase me away.
So.. IMO one has to keep some of the programming skills sharp. In order to stay relevant. But this applies when you are 1 level away from actual coding. If farther.. probably no time, and no point. Although.. too long staying hands-off, and there may be no coming back - and losing grasp of how-it-feels-like to be in the trenches.
What ended up happening was that the project work even though completed was used to gaslight me for 6 months as breaking the platform and causing bugs. Issues that infra team promised to “fix later”.
Go ahead code when you’re a manager it can be effective, but be careful when working with outside ineffective teams they will put blame on you if they can. Management is political and once you start making moves that outshine other teams, opposition will come out of the wood work to bring you back to their level of unhappiness.
The trick to identifying this is when people start naming you at meetings you aren’t in. It might be good things they are saying but that may shift as the good things well dries up.
Dropbox was the first job I've had where managers are not expected to code although they still go through a small ramp up where they can fix a tiny bug or make a hello world commit and deploy it to production to show that they understand how some of the systems work. Due to some crazy circumstances with the team I took over, I never even got to go through the ramp up. I was thrown straight into the deep end leading a team dealing with an urgent crisis that could end the business.
It was scary as hell, going from what in hindsight had been a "TLM with extra responsibilities" in my previous jobs to a full fledged EM role with all of the same accountability for quality and timely production, but none of the direct control. But I quickly realized that I was surrounded by people who were at least as capable as I was and usually more brilliant.
I think my greatest technical strength was always in eliminating technical complexity, making systems more robust and maintainable. It turns out you can still spot the blinking red lights of unnecessary complexity just by talking about the systems from a high level and asking the right questions, and when you help other talented engineers see those problems, they will naturally want to fix them. No need to jump in and do it yourself.
Once I knew I had a team I could trust and understood the strengths of the different players, I had to shift my focus to learning how to be a real manager. Managing people is a wildly different skillset than writing good code or building a good product, and I realized that I had never really been a manager despite leading teams of people. My apologies to everyone who ever worked for me before this point. Without realizing it, I had always treated the human factor as an annoyance and I probably hindered the growth of past teams a lot by stepping in and doing the high stakes, high urgency stuff myself.
When folks grew under me, especially at Grooveshark when I was young and immature, it was a happy accident and not something I was very intentional about. At Dropbox I really learned the importance of investing in people, giving them opportunities to grow and creating space to allow them to make mistakes. I didn't touch a line of Dropbox code or ever commit a thing, but my teams were high impact and many of the engineers who worked with me told me I was the best manager they've had.
Now I'm a co-founder at my own startup and, of course, I'm writing code again. Yeah, I'm a little rusty with some of the language specifics but I've been talking to brilliant engineers about their work for the last 7 years, when it comes to robust system design I'm probably a better engineer than I was the last time I wrote production code that was used by tens of millions of users. I will of course be in the hybrid role of building and managing folks for a while, but I hope I can keep my manager chops honed and support my team properly as I build and grow it and, eventually, stop writing production code again.
The whole point of different roles doing different things is distribution of labor [1]. This idea is thousands of years old, this shouldn't come as a shock. As an extreme oversimplification, the people who are very good at a particular thing, should focus on that one thing. The more responsibilities or tasks someone has, the worse their output will be. Specialization enables higher quality, faster work, with less difficulty and waste.
A coder's job is to write code. A manager's job is to manage people. The author's post listed nine different important responsibilities for managers, that has nothing to do with code. But then just brushed it off, like it's easy! People, these aren't easy things to do, nor are they quick! Just doing general management work will easily suck up 40 hours a week on any team. If you've run out of management tasks, you probably aren't managing well.
Almost every manager I have had has not performed well. With the exception of one, they never trained as a manager, nor read or understood the basic yet critical functions and skills of a manager. Some of them used to be engineers and were just promoted up to a job they are incompetent at (the Peter Principle). And some moved into the position from some other job that wasn't management (or engineering management). On top of that, often there is a shortage of project managers, product owners, etc. These are critical roles to ensure high-quality, faster output for a team. In the absence of people filling those roles, and on teams that are not high-performing teams, it's up to the manager to fill those roles for their team.
So now the manager is not only responsible for the careers of their direct reports, they're responsible for keeping the team on track and producing high-quality, fast work. I've only ever seen one or two managers that could accomplish this feat - and that's before we add-on writing and reviewing code. How the hell are they supposed to get the time for all this, much less build up expertise in all these things, simultaneously?
I would argue that knowing how to code at all makes for a dangerous manager. I've had several managers turn into micro-managing freaks, telling me how to do my job, even preventing me from doing my job. They insisted they knew better, because they had written some code in the past, or adminned a server one time... yet I'm the one with the most experience and skills in that field. (Dunning-Kruger seems worse in those with authority, who don't wield it with humility)
On the other hand, the most effective manager I have ever had, had zero idea how to code. Because he was not technical, he focused on his actual job: mobilizing groups of people towards a task, measuring its progress, helping resolve human challenges, protecting his direct reports, and helping them progress in their careers. He never once told me how to do my job. He instead asked myself and my peers a series of simple questions in order to have us explain what we were doing, and through that process, we actually discovered several times that we should do it differently, or solved our problem.
So if the manager isn't writing or reviewing code - who will?!
An engineer's job is to build things. So someone who specializes solely in engineering should be reviewing code, designs, etc. There are many different roles for people who do this - software architect, systems architect, engineering team lead, staff engineer, principal engineer, etc.
A long, long time ago, the whole point of having "Senior" in your title was to convey the fact that you were an expert in your field. If there was a "Senior" engineer, that was the person you went to to tell you if you're doing it right. Hey, I just wrote this algorithm, does this look okay, Senior Engineer? I'm changing this field, can you see anything that might go wrong, Senior Engineer? Now of course it just means a college grad got a promotion after staying for 2 years.
Not having a real Senior Engineer somewhere in the company means you are going to end up making some real turds. Having a manager take the place of a Senior Engineer doesn't help, because they can't do two completely different jobs well. You can't be both a great plumber and a great electrician. You can half-ass both, though, and get half-assed results.
If you're a manager and you want to have a high-performing team, stop writing/reviewing code, and instead do everything you can to implement the suggestions here [2]. There is an enormous amount of work needed to achieve these suggestions, so you will not have any time to look at code, I guarantee you. But your team will end up working much better, producing better outcomes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour [2] https://dora.dev/research/?view=detail
Whenever we talk about EM duties, it's always a list of fuzzy, empty words:
> Owning the team's strategy and roadmap, and ensuring efficient execution.
This is project management.
> Making decisions to ensure that the team is working on the right things and saying no to the things that don't matter.
This is product management.
> Dealing with fires, escalations, and other crises that pop up all of the time.
How can an EM that doesn't code deal with fires? The only thing they can do is pull the sleeve of someone else who does code, and then, what, hang behind their shoulder until the fire is put out?
> Building a strong culture within the team so that people are engaged, challenged, and motivated.
This is meaningless. We're not children.
> Mentoring and coaching your reports so they get better and can have more work delegated to them, thus increasing output further.
Mentoring them at what? If an EM doesn't code, how can they mentor in an area that's relevant to the mentee (i.e. a coding engineer)? They can coach them on moving Jira tickets more effectively, or playing office politics better?
> Managing the team's stakeholders so they can offer their steer to the team early and often.
Again, product management.
> Actively performance managing the team so that superstars can continue to shine and underperformers can be coached or exited.
Combination of meaningless and project management. In order to be able to evaluate someone's performance, you need to know their work. If you don't, the only metric you have is number of tickets, or "velocity" or whichever other bullshit metric you use because you're not in the trenches.
> Building close working relationships with other teams so that smooth collaboration happens across the organization, leading to a better and more cohesive product.
Office politics.
The only one that make sense is hiring and retaining great people, but you can't do either without being a technical person.
EMs that don't code making technical decisions is a showcase for divorcing decision making from suffering the consequences of those decisions. And having teams with EMs + tech leads + team leads etc. is just making things worse by diluting the responsibility.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-once-more-have-no-full-time-man...