I didn't get that impression at all. I'm purely an engineer who 100% prefers being hands on; now that I accidentally have to manage teams, I fully appreciate t

I didn't get that impression at all. I'm purely an engineer who 100% prefers being hands on; now that I accidentally have to manage teams, I fully appreciate the article's perspective. I've been on both sides of that argument as well. It's not about a manager expecting an underling to get his paperwork done. I think that is an unfair assessment of the argument being made. It's that there's more involved to the job of engineering than simply pushing code one thinks is clever. Sometimes that means knowing which problem to focus (not just the fun ones), sometimes that means dealing with other responsibilities like mentoring or interviewing or filling up timesheets or getting to work on time or attending meetings or what have you. None of those are unreasonable requests (as much as we hate them). If it's part of the job description, it's part of the job, and, for example, making a piece of code conform to one's own subjective preferences so they can feel clever doesn't make up for missing a deadline on a separate, boring, high priority task. I've frequently seen engineers who think otherwise. Who think their work is so brilliant, they don't need to care about the boring stuff. Some of them have indeed been brilliant. But guess what; they still need to get their shit together, because their brilliance is still objectively not making up for being unreliable.