Coding as an Engineering Manager
We don&#x27;t let managers code where I work. We also don&#x27;t let them do anything technical besides match employees to work they want to do. Your manager is just there to make sure you can focus as much as your time as possible being productive.<p>I really like this approach, it&#x27;s extremely bottom up. It&#x27;s not that I think our managers don&#x27;t have technical skills. They all have impressive backgrounds as SWEs etc, but this setup is for the best. The alternative at other companies I&#x27;ve worked for ended up with managers who slowly lost their technical skills and essentially fossilized, and couldn&#x27;t make rational tech decisions, and managers who intertwined their management success with the product and drove it to ruin because they weren&#x27;t making the best technical decisions for the product.<p>So please, if you&#x27;re a manager, stop coding. Manage people, unblock them, make sure they are happy. Empower them to do the coding for you.