Management advice has seasons
What counts as a good engineering manager keeps shifting with money and hiring. I've started reading each era's advice like a weather report.
Management advice has fashions, and like most fashions they come back around before you’ve finished giving away the old clothes.
For most of the 2010s money was cheap and good engineers were scarce, so the good manager stopped coding and got very good at hiring and keeping people. Then rates went up in late 2022 and the story flipped like a pancake. Flatter orgs, hands-on leaders, coordinators recast as overhead. I don’t think either story was a lie, exactly. They both just had a budget standing behind them, nodding.
It’ll flip again. I’d bet on that, though I wouldn’t bet on when.
So I try to keep the out of season skills from rusting, like a winter coat you still air out in July. Reading code when the era says people. Real one-on-ones when the era says ship. I’m not great at both, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to be. Merely okay at the unfashionable one would do.