Should Vice Presidents still be coding/in the weeds?
I work for a company that has an Engineering department with about 100 folks total. I am a team lead and am 3 levels below the CTO (CTO -> VP -> me -> my reports). My team is starting a new project next week and my boss (the VP) just announced he will be a developer on the project. He has been involved in the project since the beginning approving all the stories, architectural diagrams, designs, etc (he expects everything to be ran through him first). I haven't work for many other companies so I don't know if this is normal VP function to be this into the weeds. He is like this in other teams at the company, inserting himself into their projects. Is this normal at other companies?
There are as many different ways to do things as there are people. My take is he is keeping a close eye on you, and if you do well you'll get a lot more autonomy going forward.
But you just can't tell, this might be because he loves the game, it might be because your job is hanging by a thread. Or it might because his job is hanging by a thread. Or the company is on the line and the CTOs job is hanging by a thread.
No matter what, your best path forward is to make this project a success.
I recently talked to a CTO of a large company. He told me that he does where he thinks his impact is greatest. Up in board meetings or with developers - who sometimes are confused a CTO is attending - in architecture meetings. As a CTO for 10+ years I thought up to that point you should never code as CTO. I changed my opinion.
It all depends, I worked for New Relic, and Lew Cirne was known as the "Coding CEO":
https://allthingsd.com/20131024/you-wont-believe-what-new-re...
The real question with title is less what your job responsibilities are and more how broad your impact is. A High level person can be good if the project is tough in some way - requires a lot of cross team collaboration, lots of market risk, specific technical domain etc. New things are hard, think about the fact that a high level execs at one company could be software engineers or "low level" IC's at a young startup. But it should definitely be intentional.
Sounds like the role may be mislabelled if this is what he's doing routinely. I think the key question for me is whether he has responsibilities that are expected of him that he is unable to perform because he is doing this work instead.
Also, does your company have a separate formal architect role? Is it hard gated approval (this doesn't move without my stamp) or is he just keeping an eye on things?
No, it's not normal imo - you have 100 people in your engineering department, that's too many for the VP to be touching any code. If your company was only a handful of people, it would have beeen understandable. At tens of employees the VP should know that their time isn't best spent coding, or maybe they shouldn't be a VP.
Maybe the VP wants to code or misses it.
I would take it as an opportunity to have a conversation with them. Discuss the tech stack, and processes you/they dislike or want to do more of. Let them know your expectations too, standups and retros participation are obvious ones.
I hope, you are on your way to making an ally, a more powerful one!
Your VP in particular sounds like a micromanager, though leadership should practice some scuttlebutt every now and then (skip meetings should be semi regular at the very minimum).
How good is he? If he’s VP tier hood at coding, maybe. If he just got promoted up like most, then probably not.