🔗 Why I still write code as an engineering manager

I still code on my team. Not every day, and almost never on critical path work, but regularly enough that I know what our codebase actually looks like. The parts that are a joy to work in and the parts that aren’t.

Why not critical path? Because that’s not my job anymore. Taking the interesting, high-visibility work from your team is a fast way to breed resentment and stunt their growth. But there’s plenty of other work: small bugs, minor improvements, tooling fixes, documentation that requires code understanding. The stuff that matters but isn’t going to make or break the quarter.

So why bother? A few reasons.