ENGINEERING MANAGERS SHOULD (SOMETIMES) WRITE CODE

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Engineering managers should still write code because it helps keep their mental model of software development fresh. Staying completely away from code as a manager means letting your knowledge calcify around how things worked the last time you regularly wrote production code. The key is knowing when it is helpful versus when it becomes a bottleneck. It is fine to brush up on an intern's feature after they've moved on, but becoming the only person who can deploy releases is definitely a problem.