Managers Coding Debate

good if you're the manager not if you're the dev

It sounds like you've gone from one extreme to another. None of the things you mention pale in comparison to software engineering at all. They are all solvable problems that many people can do. Sometime they are difficult, often they are not. Managers are certainly not useless and do work for certain types of organizations. They are not always needed though. Believe it or not there are people capable of managing and programming at the same time. You seem to be one of them so your view point

It's not that you don't code...you need to code to stay relevant. It's that you shouldn't code serious production features/issues. As a manager, you're context switching constantly and it's very difficult to achieve the necessary quality. You'll never get the uninterrupted time necessary to do anything big. 5-10 min fixes are good targets for a manager, as are projects that would otherwise distract the team, like spikes on potential new technology. You sho

Hey, software developers do that too... Management just doesn't reward us for it.

I'm going to assume the article was in the context of software development.Doesn't it ignore a large swat of people? What about all the other business partners, operators and users/customers?Generally the managers job is to engage will all these other parties and identify their needs, evaluate if the team can help them with their problems or not, find out what possible solutions could be done and what the cost of it would be, justify if the team should grow or shrink based o

I'd be interested to see whether your subordinates agree with that assessment. One of the better programmers I've worked with was promoted to our manager and tried to "keep coding" and it made her one of the worse managers I've had: the team was constantly blocked because her tasks got delayed when she (as is the nature of management) was pulled away for meetings with higher-ups or other unexpected work. In turn that meant there was pressure not to interrupt her when she

Programmers can, managers don't always give the time

This is a tough question since what's best for the team and what's personally best for the manager's career may be in conflict, at least when it comes to the long-term. A manager who doesn't do any coding will over time get rusty and get further and further away from the current best practices, latest library/framework hotness etc. This can lead to awkward conversations of the type where the manager suggests "let's do/use X" where X was the best prac

The author challenged your perspective and you provided no rebuttal. Neither side has any evidence, but in my anecdotal experience I agree with you. I've worked in pretty much every type of tech organization imaginable and the ones that trusted developers across the development spectrum fared best. The ones that had managers handle priorities and wanted heads down coders to implement fared worse, by far. There is an incredible amount of craftsmanship in software, and often times developers

Yeah exactly, it changes the job from programmer to (technical) project manager, which is both more proactive (writing specifications) and reactive (responding to an agent finishing). The 'sprinting' remark is apt, because if your agents are not working you need to act. And it's already established that a manager shouldn't micromanage, that'll lead to burnout and the like. But that's why software engineers will remain relevant, because managers need someone to rely