My previous contract ended abruptly but then a month later they needed me again because their current onshore offshore team was very large and growing by the day but incapable of non-trivial engineering tasks, all the way up to the engineering managers. They were essentially the hire paid copy/pasters. I said I'd return under the condition that I will golf all day. They hired me back on, I made the thing they needed, then they dumped me again abruptly for another onshore offshore engineer.

So sometimes a headcount can be an engineer, a manager, or both, and still be an embarrassment to git commits everywhere.

I entirely disagree both with this point and with it’s apparent subtext that being an engineer is better and being a manager is worse. I take it that you are one who takes great pride in “being an engineer”. That’s a separate topic (for instance, one can be an engineer in a management job).

We have the abstraction of job titles or categories to help us reason about what a job is. We do this for a variety of reasons, but in this case the reason to do it is to help people understand whether this advice might apply to them. Ultimately, a job is whatever it’s primary goal is, and you said yours is to empower junior staff who report to you. That makes you very different from many (most?) senior/staff engineers I have met, who are primarily metric’d on their engineering work. Since your primary job is a management function and you write a lot of code, that makes you a manager with some (or many, pick whatever modifier seems appropriate to you) engineering responsibilities.

Bringing it home, if a reader is an engineer (or IC if you prefer to avoid the fraught term) and not a manager, this advice doesn’t apply to them very strongly. Yes they should care about junior colleagues, and they should absolutely make time for deliberate peering and mentoring, but they should focus on doing engineering (which can include docs writing etc) primarily.

I think its pretty useful distinction. I know everywhere is different, but everywhere i have worked the roles have been very distinct. Engineers, especially senior ones, mentor people of course, with that being a significant part of their job, but that is really different from having someone report to you.