On a healthy team a good manager will mostly stay out of the way (this could read as "too much time on their hands" if they are actually a bad manager). On the

On a healthy team a good manager will mostly stay out of the way (this could read as "too much time on their hands" if they are actually a bad manager). On the other hand, when there is systemic dysfunction in a team or organization, then what happens is the environment chews up and spits out any level of individual excellence you throw at it, burning them out, and sending them to the exits, leading to the Dead Sea Effect. These are the environments where a manager shows their quality. Debugging org issues where there's talent, everyone is busy, but nothing valuable seems to get done—that's harder than debugging race conditions in a distributed system. Solving those human problems is what pushed me (more than a little reluctantly) into management.