Earlier quoted context omitted.
TLM roles are a trap, but not in that sense. There's no expectation that you do two jobs at once. It's just a way to ease unsuspecting engineers into management. If you don't suck at management, your team inevitably grows (or you're handed over other teams), and before long, you're managing full-time. Which means that there are three type of people who remain TLMs in the long haul: those who suck at management; those…
> There's no expectation that you do two jobs at once. I laughed out loud when I read this. I've never seen anyone at any company in a hybrid tech/manager role that wasn't expected to do two jobs at once. Or at least they felt like they were, which is still the same problem. 80% coding & 80% management for that role sounds about right.
As alternative explanation, even if there's no pressure to do so, the thing is these people came to do dev, and probably enjoyed their job enough to get recognized for their work.
So when asked to split between dev and management, outside of a few exceptions they'll want to do 80% of tech by choice. But the management part doesn't go away of course, so it will still be at least 50% (and 80% if they want money, because that's the part they're actually evaluated on)