Here's one way of putting it that HN readers may identify with more: Treat every job as if it were your own startup.
If you're the founder of a company, you need to understand every nuance of the business, how it fits into its market niche, and the technology it uses. You have to convince other people to work for you; you have no implicit authority based on your title. Your effectiveness is based on how well you understand your mission as a company, and how well you can enable and motivate others to help you with that mission.
Those are all crucial skills in the corporate world as well.
They're also not necessarily mutually exclusive with being a coder/doer as well. All of the best managers I know come from a software engineering background. But it's about recognizing that other people can code & do just as well as you can, and leveraging what they're good at to help you and your organization achieve goals that neither one of you could do on your own.
If you're the founder of a company, you need to understand every nuance of the business, how it fits into its market niche, and the technology it uses. You have to convince other people to work for you; you have no implicit authority based on your title. Your effectiveness is based on how well you understand your mission as a company, and how well you can enable and motivate others to help you with that mission.
Those are all crucial skills in the corporate world as well.
They're also not necessarily mutually exclusive with being a coder/doer as well. All of the best managers I know come from a software engineering background. But it's about recognizing that other people can code & do just as well as you can, and leveraging what they're good at to help you and your organization achieve goals that neither one of you could do on your own.