it depends. Last ~3 years i was CTO of small company - with a software team of 7-10. With the idea of - no-more-coding (TM). Just the other 90% - from cleanup repos and jira etc project things - to organise proper reviews and workflows - process things, etc, to.. pushing infrastructure, hiring and pitching to investors/clients. But the codebase was.. not ideal. It was hard and tempting but i managed not to touch it directly, only did rise architectural-and-similar-level issues, and did (somewhat nitpicky) code reviews - like, date-arithmetic IS very important, pretty-please. Still, had to build a crawler over the production-codebase to visualise the event-flows and map consequences - a reverse-engineering live-Documentation, kind-a. Scratching my own itch? pfft. (hint: There was no other docs..)
But then there were some small non-essential projects that would have been complete distraction for the team.. so i took one, then another. In nodejs which isn't my cup of tea - so even better, learned some things the hard way. Though.. lucky they were rarely needing support, or it would have become a chore.
Then, one day, the company was acquired, and.. i am not a CTO anymore, but a (tech and also non-tech) Lead of some future greenfield project, ~re-factor with diff.goals. So here we go - research, architect, code, hire, discuss, demo, eh.. usual tiny-startup thing - except that the politiking and the now-everyday-a-new-policy chase me away.
So.. IMO one has to keep some of the programming skills sharp. In order to stay relevant. But this applies when you are 1 level away from actual coding. If farther.. probably no time, and no point. Although.. too long staying hands-off, and there may be no coming back - and losing grasp of how-it-feels-like to be in the trenches.
But then there were some small non-essential projects that would have been complete distraction for the team.. so i took one, then another. In nodejs which isn't my cup of tea - so even better, learned some things the hard way. Though.. lucky they were rarely needing support, or it would have become a chore.
Then, one day, the company was acquired, and.. i am not a CTO anymore, but a (tech and also non-tech) Lead of some future greenfield project, ~re-factor with diff.goals. So here we go - research, architect, code, hire, discuss, demo, eh.. usual tiny-startup thing - except that the politiking and the now-everyday-a-new-policy chase me away.
So.. IMO one has to keep some of the programming skills sharp. In order to stay relevant. But this applies when you are 1 level away from actual coding. If farther.. probably no time, and no point. Although.. too long staying hands-off, and there may be no coming back - and losing grasp of how-it-feels-like to be in the trenches.