A lot of us have been an engineer on a team where the dev manager thought they were contributing but were actually taking all the interesting architectural prob

A lot of us have been an engineer on a team where the dev manager thought they were contributing but were actually taking all the interesting architectural problems for themselves and making all the decisions, which quickly becomes extremely demotivating since the opportunities to advance your own skills quickly dry up and you’re left just mindlessly cranking out code. The worst is when an abstraction is imposed on the team that doesn’t adequately cover the problem, so you have to spend twice as much time bending the code to make the dev manager happy instead of doing it the way you think is best. Granted this is just one way that situation can go, I’m sure there’s plenty of effective dev managers who still write code regularly, just hasn’t been my experience.