Comment by skydhash
13 hours ago
> a lot of engineers I know who moved into engineering management are writing code again
They should be managing instead. Not to say that they can't code their own tools, but the statement sounds like a construction supervisor nailing studs or welding steel bars. Can work for a small team, but that's not your primary job.
Hard disagree.
I've been an engineering manager and it's a lot easier to make useful decisions that your team find credible if you can keep your toes in the water just a little bit.
My golden rule is to stay out of the critical path of shipping a user-facing feature: if a product misses a deadline because the engineering manager slipped on their coding commitments, that's bad.
The trick is to use your minimal coding time for things that are outside of that critical path: internal tools, prototypes, helping review code to get people unstuck, that kind of thing.