[JimboOmega]

Junior-senior pair programming is different from managing one report, though the line is quite blurry. When I had a solo report it felt much more like a junior-senior pairing than being a manager (especially as it was their first eng job, and teaching them the basics was most of what I did).

Ultimately as a manager you're also evaluating their work and are in a position to decide things like if their employment continues, if they get promotions/raises, etc; that is what makes it distinct. Feedback in a junior-senior pairing is much more purely about helping them grow.

Dang though. 50% of your time to code... I'm an IC (as much as I want to be an EM) and that sounds really nice. I regularly have whole days where I don't get to code (in part because, as a potential future EM, I'm expected to mentor; I have 7 regular 1-1s, for instance).

[em-bee]

how many people are you mentoring? obviously if it's more than one then you won't have as much time to code. i was thinking of the simple case where a team of two people is responsible for a single project. if one of them is the project manager, the other a coder, then the pm should not need all day to manage. unless of course they are at the kind of company that wastes everyones time with meetings and whatnot that prevents anyone from getting actual work done.