9 ms·

If there's enough work to actually justify a manager, they shouldn't have enough time to do much of anything. Maybe a bug or two that would otherwise go to a ju

• eropple 5y ago
  I've found this to be a function of the team and the culture to too much of a degree to make a sweeping statement like that. If your team is one you can trust, and your managerial responsibilities align more with what I tend to call a "producer", you can be surprisingly personally productive. But it requires a team that requires guidance rather than motivation and a company that doesn't impose structure from above, and those are admittedly pretty rare. In some management roles I've had too many reports or too many reports who expected hands-on management and yeah, it becomes a full-time, full-time thing. In others--and, to no surprise, my preferred situation--it's much more of a "first among equals" situation where, yeah, a good chunk of my time is spent in meetings (clustered early in the week when I could) to firewall off my team, but it'd be rare to not be able to carve off a full day or two afternoons for deeper work, whether it's code or architecture or analysis. And in those roles it was usually necessary to write a good bit of code, because I'd been an IC before a manager and had done most of the work--and one of the artifacts of doing more work on it, then, was documentation and making it accessible for the next person.