I wanted to take a different spin on offering career advice to software engineers. I thought it could be an interesting exercise to share several big lessons from my ~12 years of managing software engineers and transform those lessons into actionable advice.
The first 8 years of my professional career after university were managing software engineers, but I was also a contributing software engineer myself. It was difficult to balance (especially at a rapidly growing startup), but the experiences from both IC and Management perspectives were very helpful.
I hope you find value in this! TP;DR at the top of the post.
From what I’ve seen from two of them, they tend to stay away from programming. I’ve seen managers review code, but very rarely contribute any.