[jadams3]

Coded for 10 years, been a manager or higher roughly the same period of time.

What knocked me out of coding ... you should always give your best work to your people ... don't steal it, never block the team, and do the work your team doesn't want to ... e.g. c*p deflection. For any reasonably sized team (8+) and company that isn't a startup, that's a full time job. That's without going above and beyond the low standards most people set of managers these days ... working career planning, understanding industry technical and business trends, helping people realize their better ideas and so on.

One other thing I've realized ... anyone that's hiring knows that it takes new hires time to come up to speed. Depending on how optimistic or senior you are, that can be anywhere from 1 to 2 months full time. If you're a manager, you should look in a mirror, that's you. That means to be anywhere near as effective you need a month to focus on bringing yourself up to speed while delivering on some content your team needs.

If you're a full time manager doing a good job, that's not a thing unless you are giving up nights and weekends to do it.

I miss my years coding and delivering though, when I finally get to a 'work on my own terms' state towards the end of my career, I'd really like to go back to it though.

[skeeter2020]

Managers can still program, it's just not the hard/rewarding/critical-path stuff. Knock yourself out with the shitwork like documentation updates and quality of life improvements like build & release streamlining.

>> If you're a full time manager doing a good job, that's not a thing unless you are giving up nights and weekends to do it.

I don't agree with this at all, for a manager or any job.

[jadams3]

In my experience, definitions of managers and what they should be doing varies widely. A lot of developers I meet these days put a pretty narrow scope on what constitutes 'management'. The bar is pretty low, and seems to get hotly debated as marginally useful to redundant on reddit and other places. Frankly it's hostile enough I'll be glad when I retire.

I think the better managers have 1:1's were they think about it before and after as opposed to just showing up. They have career plans and objectives on a quarterly basis, and they do it with the employees as partners, not just recipients. Operations, planning to make sure teams work reasonable hours, managing customers, documentation, hiring, budget, procurement, audits & process, salary planning, all of these things are in scope where I learned about management. Managers also lose control of the hours in their schedule, they need to work on other people's schedule in the team more often than not ... urgent issues for people can come up all hours of the days, nights or weekends. If you're a good manager you're there for people when they need it.

I don't meet a lot of managers that both do those things & really want to do them. I meet a lot of good team leads who are also coding that don't do the above, which frankly should be ok and rewarded. It's misleading to suggest though that they could also pick up everything else and still have the same time available to code.

[need_new_acct]

Why can’t you now? I did the whole management thing for a few years and have gone “back” to being a really strong IC. This frees my time to work on architecture, solving difficult problems on the projects, and coding.

I do not even really see it as going “back”, just moving forward in a different direction.

My managers seem to love this so far because they can focus more on the people aspect you describe, while also having someone on the team who can step into many aspects when they want to go for vacation.