Should Engineering Managers Write Code?
This was a reply to a question from @44 (archived copy; the original tweet has been deleted) about whether Eng Managers should write code.
My take:
It depends. But in many/most cases, yes, EMs should write, or at least review, at least some code.
Some thoughts:
How can you be an effective manager if you have no idea what it’s like to actually do the job in that environment?
It depends on the team
Lots to consider - for example big difference between managing a team of 2 and 12! Some organizations intentionally prefer eng managers to have some component (e.g. 20%) of their job still be for IC work and so they keep number of direct reports small intentionally.
What to avoid
Eng Managers should generally NOT be responsible for large (and especially time-sensitive) coding tasks. They also shouldn’t be the primary person on the team doing all the code reviews.
Why some code helps
But if you consider some of the primary jobs of an eng manager: to unblock your team, help them be able to work productively, and understand their needs… then you can see how writing some code can help with these things.
Simple examples would be working on small (few hour tasks) that aren’t urgent, nobody else is already working on, but address technical debt that’s slowing the team down, and perhaps are in an area you have a lot of experience in.
Writing & deploying ANY code - even something stupidly trivial - can open your eyes to problems w/the dev environment, missing documentation, slowness of your builds, brittle deploys, or other developer experience issues that full-time engineers have simply grown used to.
Personal example
I recently self-assigned a trivial “add a missing currency to the currency drop down” Issue & ended up noticing multiple DX pain points. It gave me more empathy around how should-be-trivial things can take too long. Now making sure we prioritize improving this.
Getting started
For Eng Managers who haven’t written ANY code in a long time, my advice would be to try blocking just a little time for it — e.g, 3 hours every other Friday afternoon. You might learn more there than in a week full of 1:1s.
This was originally posted as a Twitter thread in February 2020.