They don't have to spend 100% of their time coding. Why not 50%? If you spend half your 40 hours a week coding, after presumably having had a career in engineering as a developer in the past, coding half the time will continue to support your technical knowledge well into the future.

I refuse to believe that managers shouldn't code. Actual managerial tasks do not take up that much time. Like I said in a previous comment, in my experience (as a manager), managerial tasks take up maybe 20% of my time per week. What's going on with the other 80%? I'd be bored out of my mind if I wasn't coding as much as I currently am.

I've written in another post where I spend 80% of my management time. I could cut it down to 20% but then I'd be building up the management version of technical debt. As I see it, there's a lot of things you don't have to do but doing them makes your team function better in the medium and long term.

As someone who has been managed both through traditional management techniques and a manager who mostly coded, I could not disagree more.

Read this, and it gave me a lot of clarify and appreciation for my own manager. Thank you for adding this. You sound like you've got a balanced perspective on the engineering manager experience.

I was hired into a new leadership role recently. I had previously worked my up at a few places and go to the point where I was coding maybe 5-10% of the time at most. The new role hired me for my management and strategic experience since I actually have almost no experience with their tech stack. Coding is coding, but I'm slightly useless to them as a dev for now and I haven't committed a single line so far.