The best managers I've had were ex-engineers who realized that they couldn't write code any more. One of them explained it like this: "You get your work done by moving lines of code around. I get mine done by moving people to where they're needed, a little like chess." And it was true: He was tuned into the technical issues, and knew what his talent pool was, and was quite good at helping people make decisions about what to work on.
The worst managers I've had have been the ones who thought they could do engineering plus "the people stuff", whereupon they stunk at both. (Well, not the worst -- the absolute worst tried to make all the decisions, too: Code it this way, little robot. Or neck-and-neck, the managers who made no decisions at all and left everyone rudderless until they decided on a product and a deadline; ugh).
Back to coding, that's roughly 50K lines of shipped code a year, which seems pretty high to me. Well, you can definitely do that in a green fields area, like a totally new feature or product. But writing that much code in an existing system is gonna be hard.
The worst managers I've had have been the ones who thought they could do engineering plus "the people stuff", whereupon they stunk at both. (Well, not the worst -- the absolute worst tried to make all the decisions, too: Code it this way, little robot. Or neck-and-neck, the managers who made no decisions at all and left everyone rudderless until they decided on a product and a deadline; ugh).
Back to coding, that's roughly 50K lines of shipped code a year, which seems pretty high to me. Well, you can definitely do that in a green fields area, like a totally new feature or product. But writing that much code in an existing system is gonna be hard.