Depends, I always took a sprint task, certainly less than the team itself, but how do I design a career path if I'm blissfully unaware of the work that is being done? How do I plan long term if I don't understand the technical complexity of the problems being faced? Why would I waste time on conflict resolution when I can spend time enabling and building people? You want to argue about your colleague, or make do you want to advance and make more money?
I am not gonna argue because I totally see your point. I'll keep my "No" because I think you can still do everything positive you listed without coding. I know it because I had great managers for 10 years, and none of them touched a line of our code.
They did know how to code. It just wasn't their job anymore.
This so much - I had a manager early in my career who had written code many years ago, but in his management role he touched no code at all - I think he probably spent a bit of time watching Youtube at his desk. But if someone tried to dump work on the team, messed up a shared environment, tried to bother one of the team with an out of band request he absolutely pounced on them and tore them to shreds. He well and truly understood his job was to make sure we could do ours.
Strong agree. The best managers I've worked for have been capable of coding and were often former devs, but didn't insert themselves into the team's flow like that.
It's very easy to turn "but I code" into a weird ego trip for a manager to try to look good while just making their team slow down to deal with the fact they're bad at code review or coding at all.
It's not like there's a lack of work to do for most managers that's not coding.
