At my former company, a 60 person startup, my CTO - a 55 year old guy - could code, design AWS architecture, do data analytics using Redshift (an OLAP database) and Athena (Apache Presto) and would often do POCs to research an idea and throw it over to wall to me to make it production ready.
It was a godsend when I was already overloaded with work and technology research. I was New when it came to cloud at the time.
On the other hand, his value add to the company and even to me wasn’t that he could code and design. He was a force multiplier by talking technical to our customers (B2B), mentoring, working with the owners, setting priorities based on the business needs etc.
I’ve had plenty of managers who could code and would rather spend fine coding than doing their job as a manager - career development, navigating through the political landscape, protecting their team from organizational bullshit and being “strategic”.
Coding is easy. At my current job in consulting, a hands on coding project is much easier than my more strategic consulting projects where I’m working with multiple teams, dealing with CTOs, CFOs, architecture review boards, dealing with fiefdoms where the “DevOps” team doesn’t want to give the developers the leeway they need to do their jobs efficiently and where tte developers want Admin access to everything and make a mess, etc.
It was a godsend when I was already overloaded with work and technology research. I was New when it came to cloud at the time.
On the other hand, his value add to the company and even to me wasn’t that he could code and design. He was a force multiplier by talking technical to our customers (B2B), mentoring, working with the owners, setting priorities based on the business needs etc.
I’ve had plenty of managers who could code and would rather spend fine coding than doing their job as a manager - career development, navigating through the political landscape, protecting their team from organizational bullshit and being “strategic”.
Coding is easy. At my current job in consulting, a hands on coding project is much easier than my more strategic consulting projects where I’m working with multiple teams, dealing with CTOs, CFOs, architecture review boards, dealing with fiefdoms where the “DevOps” team doesn’t want to give the developers the leeway they need to do their jobs efficiently and where tte developers want Admin access to everything and make a mess, etc.