Engineering leader, go back coding

In this challenging year, with tightening budgets and leaner teams, engineering leaders should go back to coding.

Go back to coding to understand the team's challenges better.

Go back to coding to see how easy it is to onboard to the project. What are the gaps in documentation, or what's the project's entry-level.

Go back to coding to lead by example. Helping is not micro-managing. Enforcing solutions is.

Go back to coding to experience being an engineer in your team.

Go back to coding to identify knowledge silos and understand the risk o a single-person-knows-everything.

Go back to coding to understand the SDLC process - are really "few lines of code" deliverable within 30mins?

Go back to coding to prototype ideas rather than explaining them with words or slides. There was never so easy to build some code with remote envs, bootstrapping solutions, and AI-based code completion.

Link to full blog post: https://blog.practicalengineering.management/go-back-to-coding-engineering-leader-54019b657126

Go back to coding, engineering leader
Software Engineering Management in 2023