Same. I can take on things that are nice, but not critical (yet) and make a ton of progress without bothering the devs.

I've heard this a few times already on Twitter, but wouldn't your time be better spent in other areas? even if it is 10 or 15 mins? I am having a hard time understanding this sentiment from SEM.

If it's something that anyone could do in just 10 minutes, it could be another simple task for the ICs working with you.

Context switch cost for engineers is very high. I'd appreciate if my manager avoided those as much as possible.

Also, what other 10-15min task an EM could be doing in your opinion?

You will need ICs to review the code, approve the PR, and this will go to the pipeline and eventually get released. So you won't avoid engineers having the context of this piece of work.

In my opinion, an EM should use these 10-15 minutes for any of the responsibilities that they have in their role.

I have never in 30 years across 10 jobs ever seen it work well when a manager does production code instead of just POCs.

Either you’re going to suck as a manager and not get your team the resources they need, play the political games, etc or you’re going to suck as a developer because you can’t keep your commitments and can’t do the follow through.

Even worse, is a manager who is pushing vibe coded slop.

The best thing a manager can do if they still want to code is R&D level work that developers productize.

I am a staff consultant. If I’m leading a large project, I purposefully don’t commit any code and spend most of my time coordinating between other developers and “the business”. If I do work it’s again an isolated POC.