An exaggeration but there probably is some truth to this.
Ten or so years ago even my director wrote code (at google). Now it's rare to see a first line manager code something.
Ten or so years ago even my director wrote code (at google). Now it's rare to see a first line manager code something.
Managers help organize their teams to be effective by hiring people with complimentary strengths, insulating them from distractions, and representing their team's work and achievements to leadership.
Managers unblock their team and get out of the way.
If a manager is writing code, they are not managing - they are developing. If there's not enough developers, they should be hiring.
And directors...they should definitely not be writing code.
The only valid example I've seen for leadership writing code is when they are acting as a customer and consuming their team's product (e.g. their team owns a service) with toy applications so they can understand the customer experience.
1. Making key hiring decisions is hard: coding experience lets you better see how a potential hire's technical strengths, weaknesses, and opinions intersect with personality traits to produce value or dysfunction.
2.Coding experience helps you understand different kinds of value - it's very hard to explain to non-technical folks that while a developer is brilliant and productive, he's not careful enough and six months down the line we're going to be buried in tech debt if he's allowed to keep going.
managers thinking they know better than their reports is the source of basically all team dysfunction in tech
Also this proposal does create a divide and ends up in factionalism. In this world no one leads by example.
You're talking as if Devs are brainless outside of programming, let's babysit them.
The best development managers/directors I've worked with were hands on, and they knew significantly more than me, they knew their stuff really well.
As a developer I’m very ”thankful” to a good manager shielding me from all the bullshit customers come up with — if they do their work well they indeed help productivity big time.