[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.