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Engineering Managers Should Code 30% of Their Time

155 points by kungfudoi 13y ago

puppetmaster3 13y ago
As a coder or a CTO, I say you can't do both. Code 30% of time? You know nothing of coding. Can't be done.
- icedchai 13y ago
  It can and it should. I've worked with CTOs that do this.
  - gaius 13y ago
    You can average it out at 30% of the time, but in a given week, you can't commit to it, because a greater responsibility of your job is being available to manage the unexpected. That makes it difficult to integrate someone in that role into a team in terms of dependency management. There is also a risk in being in a position of power and being seen to assign yourself the most interesting work. I have seen this happen in one team, our manager was a good guy, but somehow he always used to get the sexy work like playing with new kit, and the team got the gruntwork. It led to resentment and undermined his authority (tho' because he was a good guy, as soon as he became aware he was doing this, he stopped).
    - icedchai 13y ago
      Of course. That's why they don't take on critical work that has a hard deadline.
    - jasonwocky 13y ago
      > You can average it out at 30% of the time, but in a given week, you can't commit to it, because a greater responsibility of your job is being available to manage the unexpected I'd argue that your job is to teach others how they can best manage the unexpected. Then you should only be involved in the really exceptional circumstances, allowing you more time to tend to your (metaphorical) garden at work. If writing code is part of that, so be it. But the bulk of time, I'd argue, ought to be in mentoring others. The best managers I've worked with don't run around like chickens with their heads cut off, constantly responding to fires.
      - gaius 13y ago
        Depends what you mean by "fires". If a customer comes along with a new requirement, how do you predict that? Then your job is figuring out if it can be done, the best way to do it, if you have people free to do it and test it, if doing this for customer A will have any impact on customers B-Z, if there are any currently in-progress features you could or should cut to work on this, whether to push back on the customer and say, not in this release and how to do that without disappointing them too much, etc etc etc. Basically a manager's role includes being the interface between his team and the outside world, and the outside world is by its very nature chaotic.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  I don't think the average professional programmer gets to code in much more than 30% of working time. Too much time gets spilled looking at documentation, sitting in requirements meetings, etc. The problem is more that, to get something done while working 30% of the time, the CTO has to cherry-pick the fun projects where things can be accomplished quickly without the time-consuming slogs. That can cause morale problems if the rest of the team is spending a lot of time on slogs. One might argue that that's a sign of a deeper problem, but few companies have figured out how not to generate drudge work when at significant scale.
  - nawitus 13y ago
    Looking at documentation, doing specification is coding.
hcho 13y ago
I am in the "You can't manage what you can't do" camp but 30% is a bit steep for anyone managing a team.
elwell 13y ago
> Get a real machine to work on. That MacBook Air you love for meeting hopping? Not it. Why do you think he said that?
- victorhooi 13y ago
  Maybe it depends on the sort of coding you're doing? And also how you use the computer. I have both a Macbook Air and Macbook Retina - I have to say, I much more enjoy the Retina - more RAM (16Gb) and it feels snappier to multi-task. I also tend to have a fair amount of browser tabs open (docs and stuff), so personal usage will influence things. The author is the CTO of MongoDB - which is written in C++ - so speculation - maybe waiting 3x longer for a compile (or whatever the multiple is) is annoying?
- crazygringo 13y ago
  Because he doesn't know what he's talking about. Some people say they need dual 30" monitors to code, I'm not going to disagree with their personal preferences. But other people (like myself) see zero difference in productivity between that and a 13" Macbook Air screen, which I've been coding on for years. The whole "real machine" thing is just ridiculous cowboy posturing, unless you're doing video game development or something. A Macbook Air is just fine for web development.
  - elwell 13y ago
    Random question: I like "Test Your Vocab". Is it monetized in any way for you or just a good way to get your name out there?
    - crazygringo 13y ago
      Ha, thanks. Yes, for Brazilians (only, so far), at the end it leads to my language-software site, http://flipidiomas.com/us/en/ http://flipidiomas.com/us/en/
  - Thirdegree 13y ago
    I love my macbook pro for coding, way better than doing it on my gaming windows machine.
hkarthik 13y ago
I think this works as long as the engineering managers follow a few guidelines: * Don't code 20% of a full solution with your 30% time and expect the other engineers to pick up your work and finish the other 80% to make it production ready. If you can't cross the halfway point with a task, don't take it on. * If you do need an engineer to make your code production ready or fix a bug in it, don't act like you did him/her a favor by "getting it off the ground". They are doing YOU a favor by finishing your work for you! * Be humble and expect to take massive amounts of criticism from engineers who take a lot of pride in their code and spend their careers perfecting it. * Avoid becoming overly defensive and asking engineers to relax their established code quality guidelines or test coverage to accommodate your compressed schedule.
- ojbyrne 13y ago
  To echo your first point, I think the best task for an engineering manager is fixing bugs. It lets them keep in touch with the code base, is generally small enough that it can be compatible with constant interruptions, and demonstrates a much needed humility.
- patrickmay 13y ago
  Good guidelines. I'd add: * Spend some time on bug fixes and paying down technical debt. You'll get a better understanding of the challenges your team deals with day-to-day.
  - toadi 13y ago
    When I ran my own company as technical co-founder. I wrote POC's to demonstrate something was possible or what I wanted to habe built. I had no issue in throwing away all this code. I didn't write production code. I fixed bugs or refactored...
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
According to Junio Hamano he does 45% Communication, 50% Integration and 5% coding (Scratchin own itch) So 30% is rather high. A manager is not a coding position. If you are either you need to hire more people, or its not actually a manager role. If you are not allowed to hire more people, its not a manager role. If you can, do so now.
- icedchai 13y ago
  30% is high, but 5% is still something. Integration is often highly technical and many would consider that "coding." On the opposite site, development managers who do no technical work quickly lose the respect of their team as being out of touch.
- ryanbrunner 13y ago
  You're not really making a point, besides "a manager is not a coding position". This article is explaining why the author thinks it should be. It's not enough to say that managers shouldn't code, you need to demonstrate that either the authors points are wrong, or that there's a greater risk by spending 30% of your time coding. FWIW, I spend probably 30% of my time coding, I manage 13 developers, and I'm capable of hiring more people. If you're not good at pushing autonomy down on your team, you'll make yourself a bottleneck and have no time left to code. If you hire great people, and trust them to make the right decisions, a lot of traditional management overhead vanishes.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    Ok, that's fair. If I am going to give myself wriggle room, its that the vast majority of problems I have seen in poor software management have not come from a ex-Developer who has lost touch with the codebase, but from the other issues you / OP make - delegation, focus on team growth, structure and process improvement etc. If someone is self-diagnosing and saying "aha the reason this is all falling apart is because I am not coding more" its unlikely to be the correct answer.
- tlogan 13y ago
  When I was a manager in a big corp, 5% to 30% is spent code reading (basically understanding the machine). Many times together with the team / owner of the component. My job was not to do code review - we had a good process in place for that. It was always important to understand what is the internal state of the machine we are building/maintaining. So that I can answer to VP or PM team when they asks "we need to so X".
crazygringo 13y ago
This is ridiculous. Yes, engineering managers absolutely should understand how to code, and understanding concepts like technical debt, unreliability of estimation, etc. goes without saying. And it's awesome for a manager to be familiar enough with the tools and work to be able to implement a quick critical bugfix or similar when unexpectedly necessary. But if they're a good manager, it's far better for the organization for them to be spending their full time managing. Let coders code and managers manage, as long as they're both good at their jobs. The author's argument makes as much sense as saying a professional baseball coach should be spending 30% of his game time actually playing with his team. And honestly, this is just BS: > Once a person stops coding for a significant portion of time, critical connections to the concerns of developers atrophy. Citation needed. It sounds as fake as supposed facts like we only use 10 percent of our brains, or other hogwash.
- alexandros 13y ago
  If you're looking for anecdata, I can tell you that after stopping coding and doing "business stuff" for a while, including the "engineering management" role, I did catch my perspective shifting away from that of a developer, towards that of a business guy. Adding some coding to my routine has helped get that back, besides a number of other benefits.
- nawitus 13y ago
  I don't quite agree with that. Specialization is a good thing, but having managers and coders seems too much specialization. It leads to the situation where a manager could fix something small in the same time he communicates someone to fix it. Or situations where the manager slowly loses touch with technology. It's not likely someone will "understand" programming over the years without doing it constantly. And over time the manager's value to the team withers away. I like this idea that there are no managers who manage and engineers who engineer. Instead, there's maybe one person who takes the responsibility of managing work, but does programming or other non-managing work the rest of the time. The engineers can also do a bit of managing, but they'll focus on the engineering. The assumption is of course, that managing work can be automated away sufficiently and the team is a not huge. These are realistic assumptions, but are often untrue because of organizatonal flaws (or flaws with the manager). The baseball coach argument doesn't really fit here, because baseball is not reinvented every 5 years. Programming quite often is. A C++ systems programmer probably can't understand much about HTML5 frontend programming. But a manager with C++ background can learn.
nickmain 13y ago
Between all the meetings and other nonesense in a large corporation an actual engineer is lucky to be coding 30% of the time.
KiwiCoder 13y ago
Ignoring the dubious points of this article (30%, MacBook Air) I think a vital question being overlooked is whether a newly promoted manager actually wants to continue coding. Some will, some won't.
syntern 13y ago
My best managers were the ones that could and did code occasionally. Not just a side project of their dreams, but the same product we were working on, to feel the same pain, to understand the reasons of our decisions. I have had good politician-managers who were excellent in corporate politics, but that is not the same as having an eng-manager.
easy_rider 13y ago
The worst manager I've had, tried to often pretend he had any idea what he was talking about when pitching some gibberish during the 10min standup talk. He would often make suggestions like "and if you use Apache Solr? ". My face would be like ":/" and had to explain a subtle no (cause he was paying my salary). If he wouldn't be putting up that act, and just work the team dynamics without trying to provide technical solutions to experienced coders who will be like ":/", he would actually fare pretty well I think. But I must say if you are presented with a tough technical problem, and human resources to solve it, but you fail to comprehend the problem and how you should direct your resources in solving it, it's going to be a tough cookie to make any impact other than wasting your time, and precious developer hours trying to do something you can't. The best one I've had I worked with for a long time as a colleague freelancer, and 0 hour contract directly under him until we expanded to a 15-20 workforce. He was an experienced PHP'er, and would argue even a better salesman and networker. He would almost never write any code, but when push came to shove he would provide the fix within minutes time after a client made an upset call after hours. Most importantly: Other than being able to point out strength and weaknesses of his employee's, he was never afraid to acknowledge his own, and always assumed our expertise over his. ( unless someone really f'd up of course :) )
lucisferre 13y ago
If you have to be told you should still be writing code you've probably already lost it (or never had it to begin with). I'm surprised by the people here arguing so strongly against something that is just common sense to anyone who truly cares about software development. Sure the 30% figure is debatable, but you're splitting hairs if that's what you think this is about. There are too many people who are completely incompetent in management positions who effectively hide their lack of knowledge and skills because they are never put to the test. Moreover one shouldn't want to completely lose touch with the processes and techniques of development and design of software. How much involvement in code is required to be effective is perhaps debatable, but that you should be involved definitely shouldn't be.
kabdib 13y ago
I would much rather my manager (if I had one, which I don't) be a good /manager/ and a non-engineer, rather than being a bad manager and a bad engineer. I want my manager to have a great engineering background, but not be interested in the actual engineering except for purposes of helping the engineers get their jobs done. In other words, build a good team, remove obstacles and get the heck out of the way.
- crbnw00ts 13y ago
  This is the correct answer. The manager's job is to manage the people, not the project. That's what a tech leads and PMs are for. A good people manager works to keep their employees comfortable, aims to avoid conflicts (and resolves them if they arise despite these efforts), mentors and coaches people to develop new skills, and shields them from politics. Doing the work of an individual contributor just gets in the way of that. The manager should be familiar with and understand what their people do, but leave the actual performing of that work up to them.
LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
At a bank where I work software developers don't code 30% of their time because of meetings and other stuff going on… just a reality check
edwinnathaniel 13y ago
I'm lucky enough to have managers that care about the people under them and I think that's good enough so far. They would listen to advises/opinions, they would try to diffuse stressful situation, they would try to communicate what's necessary, they do negotiation fairly (got to give something to get something back). As a result, I would give more to them (within limits, of course). At the end of the day, it's a win-win situation: I make them look good, they make sure I'm happy and not burn-out. Background: both managers code before, one has MSc in Quantum Computing, the other does a lot of infrastructure/big-enterprise system (batch processing) so their backgrounds varies with the only commonality between them is that they both come from *NIX background and understand DB/Infrastructure rather quite well. It's very hard to be an engineering manager (lots of examples in this threads why they don't like their managers or their previous bad experiences) and if you found a "matching" one with you, priceless. Of course, nothing is forever...
cmollis 13y ago
yup..
radley 13y ago
And answer customer feedback at least 4-5 hours / week.
pjmorris 13y ago
I've personally seen horrific technical judgement calls made by managers who used to code (usually not in an environment like anything they're actually managing). There's a huge, dangerous class of problem where you think you know what you're doing, but you don't. "It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just ain't so." - Satchel Paige When the fates of a whole team of individuals rest on your judgement, it's best if it is grounded empirically or at least humble enough to account for the possibility that you could be mistaken.
SubuSS 13y ago
At least from a big company perspective: This breaks down. Any set % for coding doesn't work because there are so many 'big company' problems to deal with already that take up enough of their time. Either you will end up fixing trivial stuff that a coder would have done in 10% of the time you took or you will spend too much energy on this and lose track of your actual job. Ideally I want managers who can code / have coded for a long time in their history so that they understand the software development world. But I actually want them to do time management, people management, expectations management, customer co-ordination, issue prioritization etc. IOW - Engineers can code. Engineers usually can't do those other things without flinching. Leave engineering to the Engineers and management to the Managers.
endlessvoid94 13y ago
As the cofounder & CTO of a 14-person startup, how in god's name do you find time to spend 30% of your time programming? There's just too much other stuff that's more important.
mabbo 13y ago
God, this is relevant to me today. Today, I quit my team because of the manager. Nice guy, but zero knowledge of our code base, no interest to learn it, and no connection to what the problems we, as developers, were encountering. He didn't know, and didn't want to know. With each proposal to address major technical debt issues, he had no context, no understanding, and would only reply with demands that we prove to him that our projects were impossible without addressing technical debt. (Side note: nothing is impossible, as long as you're willing to add more technical debt). Between this, and other major problems, I'd had enough. I needed out. I told him that I was taking vacation for the rest of the week (5 day weekend, wooo) and when I come back Monday, his manager and HR are going to help me find a new team (as they had previous agreed to). I'm fortunate to work for a company where that is possible. Having a manager who codes 30% of their time might be asking too much, but having a manager working with developers who does not even read the code is not enough.
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  I hate this term "technical debt." I understand where it is coming from but it sounds like made up fairy dust and can be a little hard to take seriously.
  - mabbo 13y ago
    It's a good enough analogy to what the problem is. You are buying a solution today at the cost of continued payments when you try to make solutions tomorrow. Is it always bad? Hell no. When you need something right now, then you take a loan from the ol' technical debt bank. You get your product today instead of in a week. That can make or break a product. But failure to acknowledge what it is, debt which you pay interest on in terms of time and effort, is a recipe for doom.
    - dasil003 13y ago
      Sadly I think the term has been diluted a bit through overuse. I even hold myself to blame in sometimes referring to things as technical debt that are more accurately described as bit rot or just useful version upgrades (the ruby is particularly insidious about this).
_random_ 13y ago
Engineers Would Spend 70% of Their Time Fixing the Result
ChuckMcM 13y ago
This is a fascinating thread to read. I would love to know when people comment if they also consider themselves a manager, or have managed in the past. The reason is that I find management is a very different skill set than coding, and spending 30% on something that isn't making you a better manager would seem to be counter productive. That said, I totally get the angst over managers who have never been coders. Sort of like Scully relating the sale of computers to being similar to selling 'colored water' (Pepsi vs Coke). Not so much in my experience. There is also the question of scale, if you're a 20 person company I can easily see everyone writing code as well as doing other things, 50, 100, 2000 person company? Not so much. And there is the question of perspective, a solid engineer is there to make the best thing they can, within the constraints of available CPU, memory, and storage resources. A solid manager is there to take a limited amount of money and time and ship the best thing their team can make within those constraints. So sometimes managers decide things one way, and engineers argue for a different way, it's always helpful to be able to see the problem from the other person's shoes. And yet my experience is that line managers, often drawn from the ranks of engineers, are more able to see the constraints the engineer is working under than the engineer is able to see the constraints the manager is working under. I don't know if there is a 'right' way to blend those two roles. I suspect that if you're in a large company as a manager and spending a third of your time coding, you might want to check with your manager on how they perceive your performance. If you're in a small company and write no code you might want to check with your team to see if they feel they have it covered or not. But I can't imagine there being a 'blanket rule' like spend X% of your time coding that would have anything close to universal applicability.
- dasil003 13y ago
  Totally agree with everything you said here. The general response here is (understandably for HN) biased a bit too far in favor of coders. As a lifelong programmer who only reluctantly does management, I have to say that it sometimes seems just as hard for an engineer to understand what a good manager does as it is for a manager to understand what an engineer does. It's easy to make fun of a non-technical person because the terminology they don't understand is concrete but people management is every bit as difficult. Perhaps the problem is that it's relatively easy to weed out an incompetent programmer, but bad middle managers can often blend in or otherwise find ways to make themselves look good to upper management. In that sense a manager who codes is at least some kind of positive signal. But as a pure programmer I have to say this: two of the best managers I've had were not technical in any way shape or form. It's a mistake to think a good manager has to be technical in all cases. Good managers can add value in invisible ways dealing with the higher ups and shielding the team from politics and distraction. If the technical team is good and the manager has the appropriate level of trust then lack of specific technical knowledge need not always be a problem. As you say, it varies according to circumstance, but a lot of commenters here seem ignorant to the fact that there's more to the job than simply understanding the programmers world.
jeremyt 13y ago
Yes, and developers should manage 30% of the time and do design work 30% of the time. You know, because good management and good design is essential to a good product, and just saying that you have "done some" design or management in the past isn't good enough.
- zeroonetwothree 13y ago
  It's common for engineers to do some simple design work. And every employee does some management.
  - jeremyt 13y ago
    Yes, but the point being made here is that managers should do more. They should spend all of a whole 30% of their time coding, which presumably includes real coding projects, not "some simple" coding. After all, if all you're doing is checking in bug fixes occasionally, how are you really going to know the advantages and disadvantages of redis or puppet or any of the other tools used on a daily basis on engineering teams.
daveslash 13y ago
I suppose it depends on what you/your-organization views as the realm of "management". I like Joel Spolsky's suggestion that they should just be moving furniture out of the engineers' way. Of course, he cites Microsoft, and I know how many of us feel about that company. "At Microsoft, management was extremely hands-off. In general, everybody was given some area to own, and they owned it. Managers made no attempt to tell people what to do, in fact, they saw their role as running around, moving the furniture out of the way, so their reports could get things done. " src: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html
ommunist 13y ago
Agree. But first they need to learn touch typing.
bane 13y ago
This sounds more like what a Senior Developer/Engineer should do, not an Engineering Manager or a PM or a TPM. I seem comments here that "used to code" managers were either the worst or the best manager they ever had. However, it's the job of the Senior Developer to represent the engineering concerns of the team. It's the job of the Manager type to sit between the Engineering Team and the Senior Management, deal with paperwork nightmares, prioritize major work units, set deadlines and manage both up and down. The Senior Dev should sit at a high level of the actual business of the engineering, dip down from time to time to spot shoot thorny issues, but they should prioritize the specific engineering items and keep the team well fed with work. It is a management function, with expertise in very hard engineering problems. Sometimes the Senior Developer might represent that some work item is problematic for whatever reason and try and keep the team off of it. The manager, knowing the strategic priorities of the upper management, can either chose to manage this up, or override the Senior Dev and manage this down depending on the situation. This is something that Senior developers aren't in a position to understand. Representing only engineering up means that unpleasant shit work is often just not done. It sucks, but needing to press your team into doing work they don't want to do is how things get done. It may sound like overspecialization, and on small teams it is. But with large engineering groups, you don't want to tie up the Senior Dev, who's basically the guy who beats the drum on a slave ship, with being the ship captain. This is really hard to understand until you've been in a medium to large sized organization and had to manage there. Managing takes an incredible amount of time. Most managers don't stop working when they leave work. Hell putting together a decent proposal might take 2 or 3 months of 50-60 hour weeks.
fingerprinter 13y ago
I don't know where to begin with this. This is just nuts! This might work for some snazzy valley startup with 16 people all working on the same code base, but this is just completely, shall I say, naive and shortsighted. It smacks of someone who hasn't been involved in anything big, complex or been in the industry for any length of time. Some people don't like to use sports analogies, but I do so I will. An NFL team typically has a head coach, an offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator, a special teams coach, QB/WR/RB/DB/LB/Oline/Dline coach as well as a strength coach, among some more in certain cases. Then there are the players. Offensive, defensive, special teams. Imagine you are the head coach. Should you spend 30% of your time doing ANYTHING any of the players are doing? Should the OC or DC being doing the drills or what not? Maybe, maybe working out, but probably not like the players. My position is akin to the OC on an NFL team. I'm in charge of teams of teams of people. Developers (in different areas/focuses), QA, infra, release, ops etc etc. This is LOTS of people. So, if I'm "coding" 30% of my time, I'm effectively looking at only one area. Should I be spending 30% (or some % number) of my time doing jobs in those other areas? And do I want my managers in those areas to do those things? Well, probably not. I want them to understand them, yes, have done that job previously, yes. More over, I want someone who can 1. engage the team 2. direct the team 3. hold the team responsible 4. tell me (or others) "no" and intelligently show the way for their area and 5. lead up and down. Coding is literally so far down the list it isn't funny. So, no, a manager shouldn't be coding 30% of their time. If they want to and it doesn't get in the way of their actual job, fine, but that is not their job. Their job is to set or enact direction, lead and protect their team. To go back to the NFL example. If I'm the head coach, I want the OC to know exactly the type of offense I want to run, put in the system in place, coach the coaches on that system and make sure everyone is on the same page. I don't want them running routes with the WR or practicing blocking drills with the linemen.
eternalban 13y ago
The atelier system seems to be a good match for this field (given that what we do is effectively arts and crafts.) Regrettably, the facile access to information by the current crop of practitioners of this craft has blinded the clearly novice to the necessity of donning the disciple's apron. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelier (*: there is very little science and engineering in the practice of software development.)
nevi-me 13y ago
From following Mongo on JIRA, I have noticed that Elliott spends time coding, and could venture to say that he is led/allocated work by Dan Pasette (who is the SERVER team leader). A lot of recent Mongo releases have been delayed by over a month, with some features and fixes being delayed to 2.8. If Elliott wasn't involved in the coding I doubt he would understand the pressure the team deals with, and how realistically would his explanations to say $150 million investors be (not disregarding that Dan and other team leaders would provide details status reports)? Of course this is a grand assumption, but when I read his article last week, I came to agree with it. In my field of work, I see it all the time, over time a lot of managers lose respect from us subordinates. They no longer make accurate project estimates, their staff planning is unrealistic, they lose some of the peronism solving skills that got them there, etc. I don't expect them to go down and do the dirty work, but I acknowledge that sometimes if such was possible in our line of work, they would benefit a lot in keeping in up with us subordinates
auctiontheory 13y ago
Many developers, especially here on HN, think that managers don't understand what developers do. Perhaps so, but it's even more true that many developers don't understand (or respect) what managers do.
JackMorgan 13y ago
I remember reading once that doctors who manage other doctors still practice medicine part of their day. If so, why, when they have a business that also changes quickly and is actually life threatening, is that the case? Perhaps they realize remaining in touch with your field is valuable. Here are some papers with findings that indicate how practicing doctors as hospital administrators improve the quality of their hospitals above those hospitals that have just business managers. http://www.amandagoodall.com/papers.html http://www.amandagoodall.com/papers.html Why then is it the norm that so many developers who move into management do so to "get away from developing"? It seems unique to development, or maybe just uniquely easy to see when someone is clueless about technical matters. Anecdotally, all my worst managers were "out of touch" but thought they still were hot stuff technically. My best were either completely non-technical and trusted their team, or were developing at least 1/4 of the time (and he worked mostly automating all the crap work we hated and fixing bugs).
Daviey 13y ago
I used to manage an engineering team, and probably did spend that much time coding. Often, it was protyping or proving concepts to then pass on the engineers on the team to complete.
mathattack 13y ago
This is very true, but to be a good engineering manager, it's hard to fit all the other things in: Representing the team in dreaded meetings, coaching, hiring, fire, career advice, direction, etc. It is a very fine line to balance. 0-10% is too little. After 50%, you're no longer a manager.

155 points by kungfudoi 13y ago

puppetmaster3 13y ago

As a coder or a CTO, I say you can't do both. Code 30% of time? You know nothing of coding. Can't be done.

icedchai 13y ago
It can and it should. I've worked with CTOs that do this.
- gaius 13y ago
  You can average it out at 30% of the time, but in a given week, you can't commit to it, because a greater responsibility of your job is being available to manage the unexpected. That makes it difficult to integrate someone in that role into a team in terms of dependency management. There is also a risk in being in a position of power and being seen to assign yourself the most interesting work. I have seen this happen in one team, our manager was a good guy, but somehow he always used to get the sexy work like playing with new kit, and the team got the gruntwork. It led to resentment and undermined his authority (tho' because he was a good guy, as soon as he became aware he was doing this, he stopped).
  - icedchai 13y ago
    Of course. That's why they don't take on critical work that has a hard deadline.
  - jasonwocky 13y ago
    > You can average it out at 30% of the time, but in a given week, you can't commit to it, because a greater responsibility of your job is being available to manage the unexpected I'd argue that your job is to teach others how they can best manage the unexpected. Then you should only be involved in the really exceptional circumstances, allowing you more time to tend to your (metaphorical) garden at work. If writing code is part of that, so be it. But the bulk of time, I'd argue, ought to be in mentoring others. The best managers I've worked with don't run around like chickens with their heads cut off, constantly responding to fires.
    - gaius 13y ago
      Depends what you mean by "fires". If a customer comes along with a new requirement, how do you predict that? Then your job is figuring out if it can be done, the best way to do it, if you have people free to do it and test it, if doing this for customer A will have any impact on customers B-Z, if there are any currently in-progress features you could or should cut to work on this, whether to push back on the customer and say, not in this release and how to do that without disappointing them too much, etc etc etc. Basically a manager's role includes being the interface between his team and the outside world, and the outside world is by its very nature chaotic.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I don't think the average professional programmer gets to code in much more than 30% of working time. Too much time gets spilled looking at documentation, sitting in requirements meetings, etc. The problem is more that, to get something done while working 30% of the time, the CTO has to cherry-pick the fun projects where things can be accomplished quickly without the time-consuming slogs. That can cause morale problems if the rest of the team is spending a lot of time on slogs. One might argue that that's a sign of a deeper problem, but few companies have figured out how not to generate drudge work when at significant scale.
- nawitus 13y ago
  Looking at documentation, doing specification is coding.

hcho 13y ago

I am in the "You can't manage what you can't do" camp but 30% is a bit steep for anyone managing a team.

elwell 13y ago

> Get a real machine to work on. That MacBook Air you love for meeting hopping? Not it. Why do you think he said that?

victorhooi 13y ago
Maybe it depends on the sort of coding you're doing? And also how you use the computer. I have both a Macbook Air and Macbook Retina - I have to say, I much more enjoy the Retina - more RAM (16Gb) and it feels snappier to multi-task. I also tend to have a fair amount of browser tabs open (docs and stuff), so personal usage will influence things. The author is the CTO of MongoDB - which is written in C++ - so speculation - maybe waiting 3x longer for a compile (or whatever the multiple is) is annoying?
crazygringo 13y ago
Because he doesn't know what he's talking about. Some people say they need dual 30" monitors to code, I'm not going to disagree with their personal preferences. But other people (like myself) see zero difference in productivity between that and a 13" Macbook Air screen, which I've been coding on for years. The whole "real machine" thing is just ridiculous cowboy posturing, unless you're doing video game development or something. A Macbook Air is just fine for web development.
- elwell 13y ago
  Random question: I like "Test Your Vocab". Is it monetized in any way for you or just a good way to get your name out there?
  - crazygringo 13y ago
    Ha, thanks. Yes, for Brazilians (only, so far), at the end it leads to my language-software site, http://flipidiomas.com/us/en/ http://flipidiomas.com/us/en/
- Thirdegree 13y ago
  I love my macbook pro for coding, way better than doing it on my gaming windows machine.

hkarthik 13y ago

I think this works as long as the engineering managers follow a few guidelines: * Don't code 20% of a full solution with your 30% time and expect the other engineers to pick up your work and finish the other 80% to make it production ready. If you can't cross the halfway point with a task, don't take it on. * If you do need an engineer to make your code production ready or fix a bug in it, don't act like you did him/her a favor by "getting it off the ground". They are doing YOU a favor by finishing your work for you! * Be humble and expect to take massive amounts of criticism from engineers who take a lot of pride in their code and spend their careers perfecting it. * Avoid becoming overly defensive and asking engineers to relax their established code quality guidelines or test coverage to accommodate your compressed schedule.

ojbyrne 13y ago
To echo your first point, I think the best task for an engineering manager is fixing bugs. It lets them keep in touch with the code base, is generally small enough that it can be compatible with constant interruptions, and demonstrates a much needed humility.
patrickmay 13y ago
Good guidelines. I'd add: * Spend some time on bug fixes and paying down technical debt. You'll get a better understanding of the challenges your team deals with day-to-day.
- toadi 13y ago
  When I ran my own company as technical co-founder. I wrote POC's to demonstrate something was possible or what I wanted to habe built. I had no issue in throwing away all this code. I didn't write production code. I fixed bugs or refactored...

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

According to Junio Hamano he does 45% Communication, 50% Integration and 5% coding (Scratchin own itch) So 30% is rather high. A manager is not a coding position. If you are either you need to hire more people, or its not actually a manager role. If you are not allowed to hire more people, its not a manager role. If you can, do so now.

icedchai 13y ago
30% is high, but 5% is still something. Integration is often highly technical and many would consider that "coding." On the opposite site, development managers who do no technical work quickly lose the respect of their team as being out of touch.
ryanbrunner 13y ago
You're not really making a point, besides "a manager is not a coding position". This article is explaining why the author thinks it should be. It's not enough to say that managers shouldn't code, you need to demonstrate that either the authors points are wrong, or that there's a greater risk by spending 30% of your time coding. FWIW, I spend probably 30% of my time coding, I manage 13 developers, and I'm capable of hiring more people. If you're not good at pushing autonomy down on your team, you'll make yourself a bottleneck and have no time left to code. If you hire great people, and trust them to make the right decisions, a lot of traditional management overhead vanishes.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  Ok, that's fair. If I am going to give myself wriggle room, its that the vast majority of problems I have seen in poor software management have not come from a ex-Developer who has lost touch with the codebase, but from the other issues you / OP make - delegation, focus on team growth, structure and process improvement etc. If someone is self-diagnosing and saying "aha the reason this is all falling apart is because I am not coding more" its unlikely to be the correct answer.
tlogan 13y ago
When I was a manager in a big corp, 5% to 30% is spent code reading (basically understanding the machine). Many times together with the team / owner of the component. My job was not to do code review - we had a good process in place for that. It was always important to understand what is the internal state of the machine we are building/maintaining. So that I can answer to VP or PM team when they asks "we need to so X".

crazygringo 13y ago

This is ridiculous. Yes, engineering managers absolutely should understand how to code, and understanding concepts like technical debt, unreliability of estimation, etc. goes without saying. And it's awesome for a manager to be familiar enough with the tools and work to be able to implement a quick critical bugfix or similar when unexpectedly necessary. But if they're a good manager, it's far better for the organization for them to be spending their full time managing. Let coders code and managers manage, as long as they're both good at their jobs. The author's argument makes as much sense as saying a professional baseball coach should be spending 30% of his game time actually playing with his team. And honestly, this is just BS: > Once a person stops coding for a significant portion of time, critical connections to the concerns of developers atrophy. Citation needed. It sounds as fake as supposed facts like we only use 10 percent of our brains, or other hogwash.

alexandros 13y ago
If you're looking for anecdata, I can tell you that after stopping coding and doing "business stuff" for a while, including the "engineering management" role, I did catch my perspective shifting away from that of a developer, towards that of a business guy. Adding some coding to my routine has helped get that back, besides a number of other benefits.
nawitus 13y ago
I don't quite agree with that. Specialization is a good thing, but having managers and coders seems too much specialization. It leads to the situation where a manager could fix something small in the same time he communicates someone to fix it. Or situations where the manager slowly loses touch with technology. It's not likely someone will "understand" programming over the years without doing it constantly. And over time the manager's value to the team withers away. I like this idea that there are no managers who manage and engineers who engineer. Instead, there's maybe one person who takes the responsibility of managing work, but does programming or other non-managing work the rest of the time. The engineers can also do a bit of managing, but they'll focus on the engineering. The assumption is of course, that managing work can be automated away sufficiently and the team is a not huge. These are realistic assumptions, but are often untrue because of organizatonal flaws (or flaws with the manager). The baseball coach argument doesn't really fit here, because baseball is not reinvented every 5 years. Programming quite often is. A C++ systems programmer probably can't understand much about HTML5 frontend programming. But a manager with C++ background can learn.

nickmain 13y ago

Between all the meetings and other nonesense in a large corporation an actual engineer is lucky to be coding 30% of the time.

KiwiCoder 13y ago

Ignoring the dubious points of this article (30%, MacBook Air) I think a vital question being overlooked is whether a newly promoted manager actually wants to continue coding. Some will, some won't.

syntern 13y ago

My best managers were the ones that could and did code occasionally. Not just a side project of their dreams, but the same product we were working on, to feel the same pain, to understand the reasons of our decisions. I have had good politician-managers who were excellent in corporate politics, but that is not the same as having an eng-manager.

easy_rider 13y ago

The worst manager I've had, tried to often pretend he had any idea what he was talking about when pitching some gibberish during the 10min standup talk. He would often make suggestions like "and if you use Apache Solr? ". My face would be like ":/" and had to explain a subtle no (cause he was paying my salary). If he wouldn't be putting up that act, and just work the team dynamics without trying to provide technical solutions to experienced coders who will be like ":/", he would actually fare pretty well I think. But I must say if you are presented with a tough technical problem, and human resources to solve it, but you fail to comprehend the problem and how you should direct your resources in solving it, it's going to be a tough cookie to make any impact other than wasting your time, and precious developer hours trying to do something you can't. The best one I've had I worked with for a long time as a colleague freelancer, and 0 hour contract directly under him until we expanded to a 15-20 workforce. He was an experienced PHP'er, and would argue even a better salesman and networker. He would almost never write any code, but when push came to shove he would provide the fix within minutes time after a client made an upset call after hours. Most importantly: Other than being able to point out strength and weaknesses of his employee's, he was never afraid to acknowledge his own, and always assumed our expertise over his. ( unless someone really f'd up of course :) )

lucisferre 13y ago

If you have to be told you should still be writing code you've probably already lost it (or never had it to begin with). I'm surprised by the people here arguing so strongly against something that is just common sense to anyone who truly cares about software development. Sure the 30% figure is debatable, but you're splitting hairs if that's what you think this is about. There are too many people who are completely incompetent in management positions who effectively hide their lack of knowledge and skills because they are never put to the test. Moreover one shouldn't want to completely lose touch with the processes and techniques of development and design of software. How much involvement in code is required to be effective is perhaps debatable, but that you should be involved definitely shouldn't be.

kabdib 13y ago

I would much rather my manager (if I had one, which I don't) be a good /manager/ and a non-engineer, rather than being a bad manager and a bad engineer. I want my manager to have a great engineering background, but not be interested in the actual engineering except for purposes of helping the engineers get their jobs done. In other words, build a good team, remove obstacles and get the heck out of the way.

crbnw00ts 13y ago
This is the correct answer. The manager's job is to manage the people, not the project. That's what a tech leads and PMs are for. A good people manager works to keep their employees comfortable, aims to avoid conflicts (and resolves them if they arise despite these efforts), mentors and coaches people to develop new skills, and shields them from politics. Doing the work of an individual contributor just gets in the way of that. The manager should be familiar with and understand what their people do, but leave the actual performing of that work up to them.

LekkoscPiwa 13y ago

At a bank where I work software developers don't code 30% of their time because of meetings and other stuff going on… just a reality check

edwinnathaniel 13y ago

I'm lucky enough to have managers that care about the people under them and I think that's good enough so far. They would listen to advises/opinions, they would try to diffuse stressful situation, they would try to communicate what's necessary, they do negotiation fairly (got to give something to get something back). As a result, I would give more to them (within limits, of course). At the end of the day, it's a win-win situation: I make them look good, they make sure I'm happy and not burn-out. Background: both managers code before, one has MSc in Quantum Computing, the other does a lot of infrastructure/big-enterprise system (batch processing) so their backgrounds varies with the only commonality between them is that they both come from *NIX background and understand DB/Infrastructure rather quite well. It's very hard to be an engineering manager (lots of examples in this threads why they don't like their managers or their previous bad experiences) and if you found a "matching" one with you, priceless. Of course, nothing is forever...

cmollis 13y ago

yup..

radley 13y ago

And answer customer feedback at least 4-5 hours / week.

pjmorris 13y ago

I've personally seen horrific technical judgement calls made by managers who used to code (usually not in an environment like anything they're actually managing). There's a huge, dangerous class of problem where you think you know what you're doing, but you don't. "It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just ain't so." - Satchel Paige When the fates of a whole team of individuals rest on your judgement, it's best if it is grounded empirically or at least humble enough to account for the possibility that you could be mistaken.

SubuSS 13y ago

At least from a big company perspective: This breaks down. Any set % for coding doesn't work because there are so many 'big company' problems to deal with already that take up enough of their time. Either you will end up fixing trivial stuff that a coder would have done in 10% of the time you took or you will spend too much energy on this and lose track of your actual job. Ideally I want managers who can code / have coded for a long time in their history so that they understand the software development world. But I actually want them to do time management, people management, expectations management, customer co-ordination, issue prioritization etc. IOW - Engineers can code. Engineers usually can't do those other things without flinching. Leave engineering to the Engineers and management to the Managers.

endlessvoid94 13y ago

As the cofounder & CTO of a 14-person startup, how in god's name do you find time to spend 30% of your time programming? There's just too much other stuff that's more important.

mabbo 13y ago

God, this is relevant to me today. Today, I quit my team because of the manager. Nice guy, but zero knowledge of our code base, no interest to learn it, and no connection to what the problems we, as developers, were encountering. He didn't know, and didn't want to know. With each proposal to address major technical debt issues, he had no context, no understanding, and would only reply with demands that we prove to him that our projects were impossible without addressing technical debt. (Side note: nothing is impossible, as long as you're willing to add more technical debt). Between this, and other major problems, I'd had enough. I needed out. I told him that I was taking vacation for the rest of the week (5 day weekend, wooo) and when I come back Monday, his manager and HR are going to help me find a new team (as they had previous agreed to). I'm fortunate to work for a company where that is possible. Having a manager who codes 30% of their time might be asking too much, but having a manager working with developers who does not even read the code is not enough.

dinkumthinkum 13y ago
I hate this term "technical debt." I understand where it is coming from but it sounds like made up fairy dust and can be a little hard to take seriously.
- mabbo 13y ago
  It's a good enough analogy to what the problem is. You are buying a solution today at the cost of continued payments when you try to make solutions tomorrow. Is it always bad? Hell no. When you need something right now, then you take a loan from the ol' technical debt bank. You get your product today instead of in a week. That can make or break a product. But failure to acknowledge what it is, debt which you pay interest on in terms of time and effort, is a recipe for doom.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Sadly I think the term has been diluted a bit through overuse. I even hold myself to blame in sometimes referring to things as technical debt that are more accurately described as bit rot or just useful version upgrades (the ruby is particularly insidious about this).

_random_ 13y ago

Engineers Would Spend 70% of Their Time Fixing the Result

ChuckMcM 13y ago

This is a fascinating thread to read. I would love to know when people comment if they also consider themselves a manager, or have managed in the past. The reason is that I find management is a very different skill set than coding, and spending 30% on something that isn't making you a better manager would seem to be counter productive. That said, I totally get the angst over managers who have never been coders. Sort of like Scully relating the sale of computers to being similar to selling 'colored water' (Pepsi vs Coke). Not so much in my experience. There is also the question of scale, if you're a 20 person company I can easily see everyone writing code as well as doing other things, 50, 100, 2000 person company? Not so much. And there is the question of perspective, a solid engineer is there to make the best thing they can, within the constraints of available CPU, memory, and storage resources. A solid manager is there to take a limited amount of money and time and ship the best thing their team can make within those constraints. So sometimes managers decide things one way, and engineers argue for a different way, it's always helpful to be able to see the problem from the other person's shoes. And yet my experience is that line managers, often drawn from the ranks of engineers, are more able to see the constraints the engineer is working under than the engineer is able to see the constraints the manager is working under. I don't know if there is a 'right' way to blend those two roles. I suspect that if you're in a large company as a manager and spending a third of your time coding, you might want to check with your manager on how they perceive your performance. If you're in a small company and write no code you might want to check with your team to see if they feel they have it covered or not. But I can't imagine there being a 'blanket rule' like spend X% of your time coding that would have anything close to universal applicability.

dasil003 13y ago
Totally agree with everything you said here. The general response here is (understandably for HN) biased a bit too far in favor of coders. As a lifelong programmer who only reluctantly does management, I have to say that it sometimes seems just as hard for an engineer to understand what a good manager does as it is for a manager to understand what an engineer does. It's easy to make fun of a non-technical person because the terminology they don't understand is concrete but people management is every bit as difficult. Perhaps the problem is that it's relatively easy to weed out an incompetent programmer, but bad middle managers can often blend in or otherwise find ways to make themselves look good to upper management. In that sense a manager who codes is at least some kind of positive signal. But as a pure programmer I have to say this: two of the best managers I've had were not technical in any way shape or form. It's a mistake to think a good manager has to be technical in all cases. Good managers can add value in invisible ways dealing with the higher ups and shielding the team from politics and distraction. If the technical team is good and the manager has the appropriate level of trust then lack of specific technical knowledge need not always be a problem. As you say, it varies according to circumstance, but a lot of commenters here seem ignorant to the fact that there's more to the job than simply understanding the programmers world.

jeremyt 13y ago

Yes, and developers should manage 30% of the time and do design work 30% of the time. You know, because good management and good design is essential to a good product, and just saying that you have "done some" design or management in the past isn't good enough.

zeroonetwothree 13y ago
It's common for engineers to do some simple design work. And every employee does some management.
- jeremyt 13y ago
  Yes, but the point being made here is that managers should do more. They should spend all of a whole 30% of their time coding, which presumably includes real coding projects, not "some simple" coding. After all, if all you're doing is checking in bug fixes occasionally, how are you really going to know the advantages and disadvantages of redis or puppet or any of the other tools used on a daily basis on engineering teams.

daveslash 13y ago

I suppose it depends on what you/your-organization views as the realm of "management". I like Joel Spolsky's suggestion that they should just be moving furniture out of the engineers' way. Of course, he cites Microsoft, and I know how many of us feel about that company. "At Microsoft, management was extremely hands-off. In general, everybody was given some area to own, and they owned it. Managers made no attempt to tell people what to do, in fact, they saw their role as running around, moving the furniture out of the way, so their reports could get things done. " src: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html

ommunist 13y ago

Agree. But first they need to learn touch typing.

bane 13y ago

This sounds more like what a Senior Developer/Engineer should do, not an Engineering Manager or a PM or a TPM. I seem comments here that "used to code" managers were either the worst or the best manager they ever had. However, it's the job of the Senior Developer to represent the engineering concerns of the team. It's the job of the Manager type to sit between the Engineering Team and the Senior Management, deal with paperwork nightmares, prioritize major work units, set deadlines and manage both up and down. The Senior Dev should sit at a high level of the actual business of the engineering, dip down from time to time to spot shoot thorny issues, but they should prioritize the specific engineering items and keep the team well fed with work. It is a management function, with expertise in very hard engineering problems. Sometimes the Senior Developer might represent that some work item is problematic for whatever reason and try and keep the team off of it. The manager, knowing the strategic priorities of the upper management, can either chose to manage this up, or override the Senior Dev and manage this down depending on the situation. This is something that Senior developers aren't in a position to understand. Representing only engineering up means that unpleasant shit work is often just not done. It sucks, but needing to press your team into doing work they don't want to do is how things get done. It may sound like overspecialization, and on small teams it is. But with large engineering groups, you don't want to tie up the Senior Dev, who's basically the guy who beats the drum on a slave ship, with being the ship captain. This is really hard to understand until you've been in a medium to large sized organization and had to manage there. Managing takes an incredible amount of time. Most managers don't stop working when they leave work. Hell putting together a decent proposal might take 2 or 3 months of 50-60 hour weeks.

fingerprinter 13y ago

I don't know where to begin with this. This is just nuts! This might work for some snazzy valley startup with 16 people all working on the same code base, but this is just completely, shall I say, naive and shortsighted. It smacks of someone who hasn't been involved in anything big, complex or been in the industry for any length of time. Some people don't like to use sports analogies, but I do so I will. An NFL team typically has a head coach, an offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator, a special teams coach, QB/WR/RB/DB/LB/Oline/Dline coach as well as a strength coach, among some more in certain cases. Then there are the players. Offensive, defensive, special teams. Imagine you are the head coach. Should you spend 30% of your time doing ANYTHING any of the players are doing? Should the OC or DC being doing the drills or what not? Maybe, maybe working out, but probably not like the players. My position is akin to the OC on an NFL team. I'm in charge of teams of teams of people. Developers (in different areas/focuses), QA, infra, release, ops etc etc. This is LOTS of people. So, if I'm "coding" 30% of my time, I'm effectively looking at only one area. Should I be spending 30% (or some % number) of my time doing jobs in those other areas? And do I want my managers in those areas to do those things? Well, probably not. I want them to understand them, yes, have done that job previously, yes. More over, I want someone who can 1. engage the team 2. direct the team 3. hold the team responsible 4. tell me (or others) "no" and intelligently show the way for their area and 5. lead up and down. Coding is literally so far down the list it isn't funny. So, no, a manager shouldn't be coding 30% of their time. If they want to and it doesn't get in the way of their actual job, fine, but that is not their job. Their job is to set or enact direction, lead and protect their team. To go back to the NFL example. If I'm the head coach, I want the OC to know exactly the type of offense I want to run, put in the system in place, coach the coaches on that system and make sure everyone is on the same page. I don't want them running routes with the WR or practicing blocking drills with the linemen.

eternalban 13y ago

The atelier system seems to be a good match for this field (given that what we do is effectively arts and crafts.) Regrettably, the facile access to information by the current crop of practitioners of this craft has blinded the clearly novice to the necessity of donning the disciple's apron. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelier (*: there is very little science and engineering in the practice of software development.)

nevi-me 13y ago

From following Mongo on JIRA, I have noticed that Elliott spends time coding, and could venture to say that he is led/allocated work by Dan Pasette (who is the SERVER team leader). A lot of recent Mongo releases have been delayed by over a month, with some features and fixes being delayed to 2.8. If Elliott wasn't involved in the coding I doubt he would understand the pressure the team deals with, and how realistically would his explanations to say $150 million investors be (not disregarding that Dan and other team leaders would provide details status reports)? Of course this is a grand assumption, but when I read his article last week, I came to agree with it. In my field of work, I see it all the time, over time a lot of managers lose respect from us subordinates. They no longer make accurate project estimates, their staff planning is unrealistic, they lose some of the peronism solving skills that got them there, etc. I don't expect them to go down and do the dirty work, but I acknowledge that sometimes if such was possible in our line of work, they would benefit a lot in keeping in up with us subordinates

auctiontheory 13y ago

Many developers, especially here on HN, think that managers don't understand what developers do. Perhaps so, but it's even more true that many developers don't understand (or respect) what managers do.

JackMorgan 13y ago

I remember reading once that doctors who manage other doctors still practice medicine part of their day. If so, why, when they have a business that also changes quickly and is actually life threatening, is that the case? Perhaps they realize remaining in touch with your field is valuable. Here are some papers with findings that indicate how practicing doctors as hospital administrators improve the quality of their hospitals above those hospitals that have just business managers. http://www.amandagoodall.com/papers.html http://www.amandagoodall.com/papers.html Why then is it the norm that so many developers who move into management do so to "get away from developing"? It seems unique to development, or maybe just uniquely easy to see when someone is clueless about technical matters. Anecdotally, all my worst managers were "out of touch" but thought they still were hot stuff technically. My best were either completely non-technical and trusted their team, or were developing at least 1/4 of the time (and he worked mostly automating all the crap work we hated and fixing bugs).

Daviey 13y ago

I used to manage an engineering team, and probably did spend that much time coding. Often, it was protyping or proving concepts to then pass on the engineers on the team to complete.

mathattack 13y ago

This is very true, but to be a good engineering manager, it's hard to fit all the other things in: Representing the team in dreaded meetings, coaching, hiring, fire, career advice, direction, etc. It is a very fine line to balance. 0-10% is too little. After 50%, you're no longer a manager.