Should managers still code?

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.

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.