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A comment on Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership. Parent comment

Re:Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership by halfmatthalfcat on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @10:10AM (#26167139)
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.

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Re:Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership by marcinzm on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @11:09AM (#26167971)
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.
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Re:Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership by _ek94 on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @10:17PM (#26175161)
As someone who has been managed both through traditional management techniques and a manager who mostly coded, I could not disagree more.
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Re:Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership by ammanley on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @02:53PM (#26170801)
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.
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