Should engineering leadership contribute code?

Question

In a couple of different interviews now I have seen a negative response to my interest in being in an engineering leadership role but also contribute code. I think the best leaders lead by doing but it seems like others want people who are aligned into manager or contributor boxes. I am really curious to learn others' experiences and preferences when it comes to this.

__s · Accepted Answer

Yes. It may be how you're expressing this interest tho, because they may worry that you won't have your focus on keeping the rest of the team unblocked & productiveSay you're interested in doing code review

dave4420 · Answer

An ex boss of mine (head of engineering and later CTO) contributed code by working on small things: either prototypes that an IC would later reimplement properly now that the requirements were nailed down, or a small service that could go straight into production and wouldn’t require maintenance.
In both cases, this removed the overhead of communicating requirements to another person, and avoided distracting an engineering team from their usual duties.
In neither case was he contributing code to one of our main components.