Comment by ElBarto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ElBarto | Hacker News Reader

"Work on Bug Fixes / Small Features"

That's terrible advice, in my view.

In your job you should always do what is the most useful and productive use of your time.

As a tech lead/manager your role is to manage/lead and your time is extremely valuable. In addition, your job as a manager is to allocate resources efficiently.

A small feature is a good task for a junior engineer. It helps them grow and their time costs less than yours.

Bug fixes should be the job of whoever knows the relevant part of the code best, which is unlikely to be you if you're a manager but even if it is you should aim to train and mentor others to acquire the technical expertise.

Having first hand knowledge about the state of the codebase is helpful to doing your job as a tech lead / manager. Doing bug fixes / small features is a productive way to gain and maintain this knowledge.

You can/should have visibility of the code base through design specs and code reviews.

There is absolutely no need to do a (potentially junior) engineer's job. It might be 'productive' but it's not the best use of your time or your role, and thus it is in fact a waste of time and money.

If you only have 20% of your time available to write code, then I would much rather you do not review code in which the person who wrote it had 90% or more of their time to write code. The review will be less thorough, correct, and timely than if someone else who regularly spends more time in the code.

These 'junior engineer' tasks are attractive for a manager who still wants to be in the code. They are non-critical and small. Perfect for someone with an unpredictable schedule. However, they also provide an opportunity for the manager to have a better, but still imperfect sense of the codebase and technology.

If you're a manager you don't have 20% of your time available to write code... If you want to write code then stay in a position where it is your role.

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