Update: I’ve written a much more in-depth article on this topic that was published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal on 1/7/2014.

The typical expected path of an engineer goes something like this:

• Individual Coder
• Project Lead
• Team Lead
• Manager
• Director

At each step, their expected coding time looks something like

• 90% (Individual Coder)
• 80% (Project Lead)
• 50% (Team Lead)
• 1% (Manager)
• 0% (Director)

This seems wrong. It is not shocking that engineering management is often found to be out of touch with the tech when they aren’t working on it themselves.

I prefer this view:

• 90% (Individual Coder)
• 80% (Project Lead)
• 50% (Team Lead)
• 30% (Manager)
• 30% (Director)

I think managers and directors (and higher up) should be coding 30% of the time. That’s a lot of time out of a schedule, so I’ll grant, it’s unclear how to make it happen. I have a notion, though, that I’ve been trying.

The notion piggy-backs on the idea that one of the goals of a management job is to make yourself obsolete. It’s bad if things stop when you are on vacation.¹ So to prevent that from happening, you should be working hard to create strong independent leaders under you.

Once you’ve done that, you should be able to spend 30% of your time coding without any ill effects. It could be 1 day a week, or blocks of time, or whatever works in your calendar. But if you’re not making the time, I think you’re doing yourself, your team and your company a great disservice.

How am I doing with this? Maybe a B-. (I’m only managing to code with about 20% of my time.) I’ve been using blocks method for a while, but am seriously considering switching to the day method and hiding for that time.