You just don't know how to manage your time yet. This is every manager's first few months. The totality of your work should be done at work, or you're actually pretty bad at your job, efficiency wise at least. You'll tell yourself you're doing more than others, but eh.
Anyway, people told me that and I scoffed as well, so it's useless to type this, it's the type of thing you adapt after going through it.
I tend to agree with your assessment of this post, however as you rise up as a manager and possibly executive, one of the most highly valued behaviors is responsiveness. Knowing things and responding quickly, even after hours, can grease a lot of wheels in a large org.
This is actually another argument against coding as a manager. There’s value in staying connected to the craft, and being able to navigate the code base and answer specific questions with facts has a good amount of value. However in a large technical organization with distributed system the hard problems are always people problems, and hence if you want to grow as a manager you need to orient primarily in that direction. It’s okay to spend some time “staying sharp”, but it can be career limiting if you don’t recognize the higher level problems that only a manager can solve.
We actually can't judge this without really looking at outcomes.
If the parent leans on the hard earned skills to make better decisions that improves outcomes for their team and by extension the org, then it's entirely possible it makes them a better manager.
Where it gets complicated is questions non-related to this:
- Who and how is anyone measuring outcomes? This is often very difficult in abstract.
- Is the org actually setup to allow these teams to flourish? Will the measurement be fair, or is there effectively internal sabotage?
- What's the reward for being better? Would the parents life actually be materially better for making the effort?
Personally, I agree with the parent. On average, having good ICs making your IC decisions lead to better outcomes. Where there's grey areas is there's more than 1 way to structure this. Player managers are definitely valid. Better than non-technical managers with good soft skills making poor engineering decisions over and over.
Where I'd disagree is the continuous effort. Once you've reached a certain level, a lot of what happens below syntax. Occasionally you end up managing something you don't understand with contention in the team.
At this point, you either invest or defer. The problem with the latter, in my experience, is very few devs have experience with commercials, so most of the arguments are based on laziness, interests, or purism, rather than outcomes.
For the record, whilst there's managers we like working for, if they're not able to extract reward for business outcome for the few that chase that, are they actually any good?
Anyway, people told me that and I scoffed as well, so it's useless to type this, it's the type of thing you adapt after going through it.