People never discuss company size along with this question.
If you're at a giant company, the answer is likely no, there's enough politicing and paperwork where the highest impact thing to be done by a manager is likely not coding.
If you're at a startup / smaller more nimble org in a big company, the answer is likely yes, if you've gotten to the point where you're a manager, in theory you're a very good engineer and you should spend your time coding, but on things that aren't on critical path. Bug backlog, experimental things with no hard deadlines, proof of concepts, all of these are valuable things. Leading from the front is also just generally good with smaller groups.
Also under discussed by people having these debates (typically managers), is not acknowledging how bad most managers are at coding, especially if their job hasn't required them to code in a while. I see all the time that managers look for any excuse not to code, because it would reveal to their team that they're at best an L4 level coder after being in management for 5-10 years.
Agreed. This debate is useless without discussing the context of company size.
If you’re a manager at a big company with a project that intersects with 5 other teams and you have a dozen people who call themselves stakeholders for your work, you’re not going to have any time to code.
If you’re a manager at a small company where everyone knows each other and team sizes are small, there might be something wrong if your calendar is full of meetings.
I’ve been at a couple small companies that hired big company managers. They felt obligated to create more meetings, documents, and discussions to fill their time and look busy. We finally had to start screening for managers who knew how to fill their time with something productive, whether it’s coding or going out and working with customers.
Generating meetings until your calendar is full is a game in itself at a lot of companies.
A few comments also mention experience being out-of-date. I expect that's true in webdev, but an embedded C developer could take a 10 year break and still be using the same compiler version.
It varies a lot with context. Manager isn't even a well-defined term.
If you're at a giant company, the answer is likely no, there's enough politicing and paperwork where the highest impact thing to be done by a manager is likely not coding.
If you're at a startup / smaller more nimble org in a big company, the answer is likely yes, if you've gotten to the point where you're a manager, in theory you're a very good engineer and you should spend your time coding, but on things that aren't on critical path. Bug backlog, experimental things with no hard deadlines, proof of concepts, all of these are valuable things. Leading from the front is also just generally good with smaller groups.
Also under discussed by people having these debates (typically managers), is not acknowledging how bad most managers are at coding, especially if their job hasn't required them to code in a while. I see all the time that managers look for any excuse not to code, because it would reveal to their team that they're at best an L4 level coder after being in management for 5-10 years.