If you’ve been leading teams for a while or if you pick up a new team, one of the easiest ways to gain the team’s respect and get up to speed on what they’re doing is to get your hands dirty — usually by taking on a grungy task no one else wants to do. You can have a résumé and a list of achievements a mile long, but nothing lets a team know how skillful and dedicated (and humble) you are like jumping in and actually doing some hard work.
This is also important for maintaining context on where your engineers are coming from when you interact with them.
