Splitting Coding Managing 50-50 is a Recipe for Failure

I had a chat with a manager that is looking for his next adventure and he mentioned companies now expect engineering managers to split their time 50:50 between coding and managing.

50:50 coding/managing is a recipe for disaster for a manager.

Why?

Even if the company (or the hiring manager) says engineering managers have to split their time like that:

• Every other leader that interacts with the engineering manager will expect them to be a manager, which means: meeting them to talk about work.
• Every person on the manager’s team expects them to work with them, that means: coding.

Both skills are possible for a person to have, hence engineering manager as a title.

Doing both at once? There’s just not enough hours in the day to have a person do a good job at both at once!

I know this first hand.

When I put myself in a coding/managing 50:50 split situation, that was the expectations by everyone.

Every time I was in a meeting that I was not involved in more than 60%, I felt I was losing time to coding.

Every time I had free time to code, I was squeezing it in between meetings.

The situation was frustrating. I couldn’t deliver code as well as I did before. I became a blocker on my team in different ways.

• I wasn’t interacting with leadership to clarify their needs because I wasn’t whole heartedly in the meetings.
• I did not deliver on my coding commitments as well as I could have because… I was in meetings.

So, choose one. Managing or Coding. Both of those tasks take different skills AND copious amounts of time to excel at.

Dedicating half the amount of time to each drops both results to less than half for each.

Pick one and excel.