The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

I took pains to make sure that we called out the fact that engineering directors would not necessarily be writing code every day, because I believe that it is very difficult for a person responsible for hands-on management of multiple teams to write code. Your schedule, by this point, has probably moved away from “maker” and firmly into “manager.” Between your 1-1s, meetings with other engineering leads, team planning sessions, and sessions with your peers in product management or other business functions, you’re probably quite busy. Be realistic about your schedule at this point. If you don’t have solid blocks of time to dedicate to it and you can’t realistically guarantee solid blocks of time at least a few days a week, any code you write is going to be very slow-going. Fortunately for us, there are ways to stay hands-on that don’t require writing a lot of production code. Code reviews are a good thing to stay in practice with, at least as a secondary reviewer. If you created systems when you were more hands-on, stay engaged with those systems, because you’ll remember the details better than most, and you can help engineers working in those systems with code reviews and questions. Debugging and production support are also valuable. How you stay hands-on depends on your skill set. If you were not a strong debugger before you went into management, jumping into incidents may be more annoying than useful. You may be more helpful doing pair programming, or fixing minor bugs o...