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.
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.
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.
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.