Welcome back everyone. I'm Cyrus. And today we have a question that I'm asked absolutely all the time
Especially by new managers or folks who are considering the management career path
question super simple it's
As a manager, how much should I be coding on a day-to-day basis? This is an interesting one because in my opinion there's no
Perfect answer. There's no perfect amount of percentage of your time and you absolutely should be coding but the answer is unequivocally
Yes, and it's yes for probably a pretty good percentage of your time in my opinion at least naturally the next
Question is well
Why why is it so important for me to continue coding with a good percentage of my time now that I have all these new?
responsibilities
there are at least
Maybe four or five reasons why it's it's super important the first is that as a manager?
Your primary responsibility is to serve your reports and if all of your reports are frontline
Engineers and you yourself aren't experiencing their daily developer experience
it's gonna be hard for you to stay empathetic to what they're experiencing and make really smart decisions about
where to invest time to improve processes or to improve tools and to
really know what your developers are feeling when they come to you and say things like it's really important that we
Refactor this particular part of the system if you're not crashing into that friction on a day to day basis
It just gets harder for you to credibly defend those decisions to your partners in product design your stakeholders
Etc. The other piece to think about is
That partnership with product and design over time if you're not writing code on a day to day basis
You're not staying close to the code that's being produced
It's gonna become harder and harder for you when you're working with product and design and they're asking for estimates about things they're asking you
to gut-check
Ideas that they have for different directions the product can go if you don't really know what's going on on the ground
It's going to be hard for you to think on your feet and be a really helpful partner to
Your other create other creative folks in the room product design, etc
Another thing to think about is a high impact the high risk architectural and technical choices that do come up
over time if you lose those muscles that keep you in
context of the state of the code how it works today if you lose those muscles of
how to design systems really
well
it's going to be harder for you to be more than a
facilitator when those kinds of difficult decisions come up
Being able to not only facilitate
as a good manager will do and make sure everyone's ideas over are heard but also be able to critique them and challenge them and
Drive the conversation in interesting directions is a valuable skill. You don't want to lose that that's two parts, right?
That's not only having the technical skills to be able to evaluate the decision, but also having the context of the state of the system
And really knowing kind of where you're migrating from and what you might be migrating to and lastly this is sort of a long-term
thinking piece
If you're early in your career, and you become a manager, you've been given management responsibilities
maybe you're at a small and fast growing startup and you've really proven yourself as an effective engineer and you have a lot of
Context and and now folks are giving you the opportunity to manage or be responsible for a broader group
You want to make sure that you know dive into a focus on management skills and start
Atrophying or losing your technical skills really early on in your career. You never know
What twists and turns your career is gonna take and if you're in your 20s
And you've essentially stopped developing your technical skills
That's gonna make it harder for you to jump into all sorts of different roles that might appear
Opportunities that might appear for you later in your career. You don't want to go to three for five years without
Credibly coding important things. You'll just lose your touch. So the second piece comes up now
It's like well how much right if we agree that you should be coding
Still how much time should you dedicate to that versus all of your new management responsibilities?
now
This is really going to depend on the specifics of your company and your team
composition and all that but as a general rule of thumb
I like to tell folks that our
New managers are kind of new frontline
managers of maybe one team that they should still be coding at least 50% of the time and that 50% of the time can include
things like code review
Working through architecture diagrams or architectural designs with folks on the team
But you don't want it to drift all the way towards just code review and feedback on architectural designs
You want to make sure that within that 50% of your time?
It's laser focused on the code the product itself that maybe with at least
35 40 percent of it. You are yourself actually writing code
That balance will change over time
But aiming for that is a good rule of thumb and a good target
Especially in your first role as a manager
a lot of this advice has been aimed at kind of a first time manager someone who is new to the role and maybe is
managing just one squad or team
But over time your rules gonna change and it's gonna grow
Ideally, maybe you start managing a couple of teams and maybe over time. You're actually managing managers
and when that happened is
naturally
The amount of time that you can commit to coding is going to go down because the amount of time that you're spending on management
And more strategic longer-term planning related initiatives is going to go up but nonetheless
Always make sure that you're reserving some time to stay
Coding if you can't get it at work then make sure you're doing it outside of work because all of those points in the beginning
Still apply has you become a more and more senior leader
You're still gonna be want to participate in high risk and high leverage technical decisions
You're gonna want to be able to speak and think credibly about the strategy for the technical side of the business
And so never losing your touch and never losing your muscles is super important whether you're a first-time manager
Managing for years and that's all for this video
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So if you like this one, I'm sure you like the others and thanks for watching. See you next time