> The basic thesis is one of dedicated roles, with the manager archetype focusing their time towards enablement, communication, and expectation.<p>No, it's because programming requires a mental model of the software and most managers don't have that. Add in constant interruptions and the inability to focus and you have a recipe for disaster.<p>Would you sometimes take a break from programming to go help accounting do the accounting work? No, no you wouldn't - accounting would smack the tar out of you. Just because you think you can contribute because you used to be able to is the notion that you need to break, and this applies to other fields too.<p>> This starts young with telling kids they can't be good at multiple things. "You need to focus."<p>A lack of focus on a problem space is usually the problem, yes. This isn't because we want people to stay in their lane and want to keep kids from being creative. It's because difficult problems are hard to solve.<p>If you are going to spend hours pulling down code and building it, ask yourself this question:<p>"Is this the best use of my time? Is pulling down source code and waiting for a compiler the best thing I as a manager can be doing?"
> So, should managers code, design, and in other ways contribute in some way to production code or design? Sure, I don't see any reason they can't. Just understand the boundaries and stay out of other people's way.<p>Has this person been a manager? The amount of time is takes to keep up to date enough to make a net positive contribution is non-trivial. Doing this on top of management responsibilities? Good luck.<p>The communication between a development team and the rest of the company is complicated. Navigating this requires both a skillset completely orthogonal to writing software and a lot of time.
Using the tools, trying the workflow, experiencing the friction, and just generally developing empathy for the day to day will make everyone better at their jobs. That includes job shadowing, which this is pretty much a form of. The major caveat is that you cant be part of critical path and its sometimes tricky to write even a great PR and expect honest feedback.