I tend to agree with your assessment of this post, however as you rise up as a manager and possibly executive, one of the most highly valued behaviors is responsiveness. Knowing things and responding quickly, even after hours, can grease a lot of wheels in a large org.
This is actually another argument against coding as a manager. There’s value in staying connected to the craft, and being able to navigate the code base and answer specific questions with facts has a good amount of value. However in a large technical organization with distributed system the hard problems are always people problems, and hence if you want to grow as a manager you need to orient primarily in that direction. It’s okay to spend some time “staying sharp”, but it can be career limiting if you don’t recognize the higher level problems that only a manager can solve.
This is actually another argument against coding as a manager. There’s value in staying connected to the craft, and being able to navigate the code base and answer specific questions with facts has a good amount of value. However in a large technical organization with distributed system the hard problems are always people problems, and hence if you want to grow as a manager you need to orient primarily in that direction. It’s okay to spend some time “staying sharp”, but it can be career limiting if you don’t recognize the higher level problems that only a manager can solve.