An ex boss of mine (head of engineering and later CTO) contributed code by working on small things: either prototypes that an IC would later reimplement properl

An ex boss of mine (head of engineering and later CTO) contributed code by working on small things: either prototypes that an IC would later reimplement properly now that the requirements were nailed down, or a small service that could go straight into production and wouldn’t require maintenance. In both cases, this removed the overhead of communicating requirements to another person, and avoided distracting an engineering team from their usual duties. In neither case was he contributing code to one of our main components.