When I was a dev lead I split my time between (1) high level sizing business needs to develop a roadmap, (2) architecting solutions, and (3) enabling/QC on more

When I was a dev lead I split my time between (1) high level sizing business needs to develop a roadmap, (2) architecting solutions, and (3) enabling/QC on more junior devs. That felt pretty right to me. I agree adding on PM tasks to that is too much. Generally why we had something like a PM to do that. Last couple jobs had Engineering Managers to do (1) and generally manage the team. The problem is that EMs don't really know anything about anything. Maybe at one point they were a developer and knew stuff. But since they're not in the code every day they don't know the reality of the code base and their general programming skills decay. Effectively they become a relayer of messages between the dev team and the business with lots of information being lost along the way. I much preferred the previous way.