What was an Application Engineer who has "not written any code for 3 months" doing for that amount of time then? Surfing Usenet? It seems like putting out fires would've involved at least some code.
Maybe not officially, quote possibly as an ad hoc manager due to deficiencies in the offical management.
I've been in that position before. If you have a good relationship with your coworkers, it's more efficient to diagnose problems yourself and then ask your coworkers to fix them (i.e. play the PM role). I don't enjoy being a manager, I'd rather write code. However, I'd rather put fires out quickly by working as a team instead of playing the martyr and trying to do it all myself, or singing the "it's not my job, I'm not a PM" song while the ship is sinking.
It's not uncommon at all to interview people who have 10+ years experience at <Big Co> who can't even answer basic questions about industry-wide technology you're using, because they didn't bother to stay in touch...they didn't need if for their last role and thought that that would last forever.
On the flip side, I see people get excited about <internal NIH syndrome technology> and learn all the ins and outs, and don't bother to research and find out that other companies or FOSS has been doing the same thing but better for a decade. And then, when they leave the company, that internal tech becomes inaccessible and the knowledge somewhat useless.