[khendron]

I attempted to make this change a few years back, and failed miserably.

What went wrong? For me, personally, the problem was still having too many developer duties. I had a full schedule of management duties to attend to, and a full schedule of development duties to attend to. I quickly began to burn out, and did a poor job on both. Although I excelled at some of my management duties, others were critically neglected due to lack of time. Specifically, at the manager level inter-team communication is important and I did a shitty job of it.

In hindsight, I should have dropped my developer duties completely. I didn't because my team didn't have the employee resources to meet its objectives. But attempting to take on critical-path development duties in order to fix the problem was the wrong thing to do. I did me no favours, nor did it help the company. Maybe I did it because I was more comfortable doing development than with the inter-team communications duties I was neglecting. In any case, we would all have been better off if I had spent more time paying attention to my team's place in the rest of the company, and simply pushed back on schedule and resources.

[dmak]

I don't think it's easy to manage and program. In my experience, you have to delegate. Programming, I at least want to agree on a technical design and then delegate it off to a member of my team.