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Comment by jasallen | Hacker News Reader

Your argument sounds good in theory, but a lot of us have the experience that 'good managers' are unicorns.

Before my start-up, I was a dev manager. And a damn good developer. I knew what technical difficulties my team had, and understood them, because I was the first place they came for an extra set of eyes. I ran defense from upper management because I knew the concerns, and I was the one with the voice. Because I'm also an open-book style manager I didn't play the "they don't need to know" card, but I could handle those things without them first having to mount a case to me every time.

I've watched A LOT of "I used to code" managers, and almost to a man, they are a disasters.

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Exactly this. If you are a PM at a Valley outfit & can't code right now, your team simply pretends to respect you, while going off & doing its own thing. Its just one of those empirical things. Doesn't matter if you "used to code" once upon a time. Things are moving at a breakneck pace & if you don't keep up, you are really going to get left behind. I will also say that if you are a PM at a non-Valley outfit like a bank or one of those outsourcing firms, the exact opposite holds true. You should probably not code & spend all of your time managing. IBs especially frown at MDs & VPs taking on hands-on roles instead of managing & filling out gantt charts. My Manager at Goldman used to write compilers using javacc to automate risk algebras - he regularly got the stink eye. He used to tell me "they just want me to run the spreadsheets" :)

Being able to code is very different from coding 30% of your time at work.

Seriously.

A manager is responsible for controlling, administering and maintaining the work being done by their subordinates. A big chunk of that is determining what work is yet to be done, if it's on time, what needs to be done to support the existing work, communicating with other teams, doing research, quashing harmful discourse and building morale. They organize, prioritize and double-check the tasks assigned and meet with their subordinates to ensure everything is going smoothly. They plan, develop, monitor, communicate, and assess their employees and their work. And of course they attend countless, constant meetings.

If as a manager you can do all that and then have 2.5-3.5 hours a day left to write code, bravo.

OK, but how do they know what needs to be done?

A baseball coach knows if the pitcher isn't doing so well, because he's watched the games. How does a manager know if the new API is unwieldy, or if errors in one component are causing serious grief?

I mean, you can ask employees to blame their peers, but some won't want to, and some will be a little too eager.

There is more going on in baseball than that. Similarly, there is more going on in software dev team management than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coach_%28baseball%29

After a while of not coding 30% of the time, you can no longer code at all.

Do you have a citation for this? I've had some stretches in my career where I went a long time without doing any significant coding, and have always been able to ramp back up to speed quickly when needed.

Both my parents used to code (my dad on punchcards and my mom on a massive mainframe). It took significant time for either of them to pick up HTML for side projects.

Even in my own life, I was a developer from 10 to 18 (working 14 to 18, school 10-14) then I took about 7 years off to go do physical sciences. While I retained the basics like for loops and function calls, I totally lost a good portion of the rest of it.

At least in your case, you not only stopped coding but you stopped being around code or dealing with code. That is very different from not coding for 30%. Good chances that if you coded say 5-10% a week and spent the remaining time thinking about code architecture or code reviews, you'd be in a much different position.

Your comment is interesting but I'm having a hard time believing that "risk algebra" is a thing.

It took me less than a minute of searching to determine that it is.

http://www.academia.edu/896634/Risk_Probabilility_and_Uncert...

I know this wasn't your point, but there are more businesses in the world than just "Valley outfits" and "non-Valley outfits like banks or those outsourcing firms"...

OTOH the best manager I had was a "I used to code" manager.

However, the situation was VERY different from a Silicon Valley startup, it was for a credit rating company with very stable systems.

I might agree with the assertion that the manager must keep up with tech for a startup or fast-paced Silicon Valley company. 30%, 20% or whatever.

"I've watched A LOT of "I used to code" managers, and almost to a [PERSON], they are a disasters."

What if everyone of the ones he's watched were men?

At least two of those of which I can recall were women. But the idiom is "to a man". It might be sexist of me to change a gender neutral idiom to be masculine, but using an innocuous masculine idiom is not harming anyone or promoting stereotypes. It's just using an idiom, man. or woman. or child. or political correctness bot.

You can't convince a Femiban (feminist taliban) to drop this kind of bullsh*t behavior.

Please learn English before casually accusing someone of sexism.

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