I used to regularly run the engineering manager community of Practice at my current workplace. I loved and still love it. But now I barely get time to do anything extra. My hours are so squeezed into a specific slot of time - the time when my toddler is not at home. :D
I got asked in the community slack channel a very important question. One that a lot of engineering managers debate in their heads. Especially if they used to be tech leads and then switched to managing others. They get their joy from helping others develop and also building something that others can use.
came across this article earlier around coding as an SEM. how many people here have a chance to do that during their working day out of interest? (not talking about personal projects but actual tickets)
My take on this
I would not directly get involved in coding in my team’s repository - primarily due to the breadth of our role at my workplace and the risk of EMs being the bottleneck due to that very fact.
If this were to evolve into an expectation from the EM role, I don’t mind doing it, so long as it also aligns with my career aspirations.
I think this comes down to two things:
- Which engineering manager archetype(s) you naturally fall under. You could be more than one.
- The expectations of the role at the organisation
I imagine a world, which is evolving rapidly, where companies find efficiencies through AI productivity tooling and encourage EMs, and others in engineering leadership to contribute technically via code or other means. I already know of companies that have done this and have led to attrition because EMs were expecting to progress strategically and not technically.
However, I do like to maintain proximity to my team’s development workflow as this helps spot bottlenecks, suggest/provoke discussions on improvements. Particularly helpful if you don’t have experienced TLs and you are fairly technical.
But I’ll always remember what my mentor said - any engineer in the team can contribute to code, but there is only one EM to be the EM.
So prioritise accordingly.
What about coding outside of work?
You are probably not an engineering manager outside of work.
So code as you will, as much as you want, to your heart’s content!
Nothing should stop you from doing what you want, except of course, your time limitation, your dependents, etc. But you could still find time to do what you love, if you really wanted to.