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Should managers still code?

theengineeringmanager.substack.com

291–300 of 319 posts

Re: Should managers still code?

#291
post #238
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> waste their nights and weekends doing a variation of your job Why is that a waste? I'm an EM and code both at work and on nights/weekends. During the work day, I spend most of my time helping other people directly (code review, talking through designs, 1:1s, xfn collab, etc.) To build larger things, I do them nights and weekends. It's not a waste. I'm better as an EM because of it. And being a better EM gets me mor…

You just don't know how to manage your time yet. This is every manager's first few months. The totality of your work should be done at work, or you're actually pretty bad at your job, efficiency wise at least. You'll tell yourself you're doing more than others, but eh. Anyway, people told me that and I scoffed as well, so it's useless to type this, it's the type of thing you adapt after going through it.

I tend to agree with your assessment of this post, however as you rise up as a manager and possibly executive, one of the most highly valued behaviors is responsiveness. Knowing things and responding quickly, even after hours, can grease a lot of wheels in a large org.

This is actually another argument against coding as a manager. There’s value in staying connected to the craft, and being able to navigate the code base and answer specific questions with facts has a good amount of value. However in a large technical organization with distributed system the hard problems are always people problems, and hence if you want to grow as a manager you need to orient primarily in that direction. It’s okay to spend some time “staying sharp”, but it can be career limiting if you don’t recognize the higher level problems that only a manager can solve.

Re: Should managers still code?

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cant work for someone who doesn't understand what I do. 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…

Specifics sure. I dont expect them to understand the specifics. I dont want them across every task. 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,…

> 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.

Which they pay you for? Otherwise why don’t you drop them as clients? I’m unclear how that’s “waste” from a business perspective.

Re: Should managers still code?

#293
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just tell them all to regularly communicate/listen to their team? Sounds way more efficient.

If a manager communicated with and listened to their team, but their team had written a web service with gaping security holes or disastrous data integrity practices because all their senior engineers were incompetent and/or were hired at a level that was above their ability, would that manager find out just from chatting with them? I promise you that it's not guaranteed. You need to actually go looking through the c…

I think you can certainly learn a lot by being curious and fishing out anything that smells, yeah.

But agreed that youll find more mistakes, if your manager also happens to be the best IC on the team.

Re: Should managers still code?

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of jobs where the bosses bosses boss does know the job as that’s where they started. Your post has an authoritative tone but is too reductive and dismisses the real world often working in a completely opposite way, so I’m not sure it’s a credible argument.

> jobs where the bosses bosses boss does know the job Doesn't make sense. With 7 - 10 reports per manager, that means the higher up boss or CEO should know how to do the jobs of 350 - 1000 different people. (7*7*7)

If you promote up, and you have 3 levels, then the CEO should have done the exact job of 3 people below him on his ascent.

Re: Should managers still code?

#295
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really want your senior and staff engineers bogged down with career management, hr disciplinary implementation, team salary budgeting, and all the miscellaneous other duties of a manager. You want them thinking deeply about the code, the business problems, and how the two meet. In terms of evaluating job performance, you've got peer reviews, deadlines met, contributions in meetings and so forth. In other wo…

I think that's the crux though, for some reason companies think that a team of 3-5 engineers needs a full time people manager. Unless you are dealing with all juniors or a bunch of primadonnas I don't see how every team needs their own people manager.

Hence, my original point. Some of these people are, in fact, redundant within the org.

Re: Should managers still code?

#296

Reading these arguments are funny to me. By now there should be decades worth of research on this topic, all we seem to do is give anecdote after anecdote with no conclusion. 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.

It should be unsurprising that we don't really have a science of what company policies work best. There are a lot of variables at play and they likely interact with each other in non-linear ways. Outcomes are hard to measure and may look different at different time horizons. For example, if policy A results in more productivity but makes retaining effective employees more difficult you may need several months or even a few years of observations to truly understand the effects. Companies are quite private about their information and they want control over their own company policy. Experiments are costly to perform. How would you perform one? Randomly select a bunch of companies and try to randomly get them to adopt different sorts of policies?

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.

Re: Should managers still code?

#297
20 years ago I got tired of programming day-to-day and became a manager who still dabbles in development. I don't contribute to production code, but I do architecture, prototyping/research, and will roll up my sleeves to help a stuck programmer do debugging.

Re: Should managers still code?

#298

I cant work for someone who doesn't understand what I do. 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 the…

> I cant work for someone who doesn't understand what I do. 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…

> 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.

From what I understand, Elon Musk previously spent his time on the line in Tesla.

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