From a practical point of view, I think anyone who has written any substantial amount of code is aware of the cost of context switching. Now picture a diary whe

From a practical point of view, I think anyone who has written any substantial amount of code is aware of the cost of context switching. Now picture a diary where you have 5 to 10 meetings a day with 30min free slots in between, and staying on top of emails on top of that. How much thoughtful coding do you expect to achieve? I think managers gain at doing some coding to stay in touch, and certainly home projects are very useful. But it is impractical to expect anyone who runs a large team to be productive in term of writing code.