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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Me: trying to stay hands-on and technical on all topics, which first of all was impossible, and second which distracted me away from the key managerial duties of keeping communication channels flowing, projects on track, people unblocked, strategy devised, and so forth.

I don't know if anyone has alternative tips. I know people who do all their hands-on stuff as managers on the weekends with private projects so they can learn new tech (like k8s).

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I believe you cannot stay hands on and technical on _everything_. You might have some specialties you are good at from before becoming a manager, and have constructive input there. The rest, you delegate to other, usually senior members of the team. They will be better suited to do architectural decisions and code reviews than you.

In the end your senior developers will end up better developers and better in technical stuff than you. And that is fine.

IMO this is part of your job, and not something to be done on weekends. I had a manager that would set time aside on Friday afternoons to write some code or play with new tech, worked well for him.

It's incredibly hard to find time where a) you're not in meetings and b) you're not interrupted or needing to reply to communication through email or Slack.

The feeling of urgency of those things, connected to a reputation for being on top of things, makes it extremely hard to book a 4 hour uninterrupted window to work on something.

Take (Jira) tickets and do them just as any other direct report. That's what I do.

Personally, I'll never stay at a company where my manager does this. The manager almost never has time to do these things properly.

The manager almost never has time to do these things properly.

... and has the power to pick and choose what they work on. My present manager does this and only does the fun/interesting stuff leaving the grunt work to the team. Sometimes he does half a ticket, gets bored, and “delegates” the rest.

I often do mediocre / small / shit tickets, it's definitely true that my staff have way more interesting tasks than I ever do.

A manager who picks clean interesting stuff and leaves the rest would be an absolute nightmare to work for. He shouldn't be in the business of managing people, since his self-interest now interferes with the interests of the team and the company.

Sounds like you've never met a good engineering manager.

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