I've noticed that in some organizations its seen as a bad practice when leaders get involved in the day-to-day business (writing code), yet, there seems to be some benefits when leaders are close to day-to-day work. What is the optimal trade-off?
I have always written code, even when running multiple teams, but that's has mostly been my preference. My personal view is that being a 'hands on' leader means you actually get a real understanding of the channelise the team faces with product code, dev process, and tooling. Very easy to become isolated from realities of the development lifecycle.