Stripe encourages engineering leaders to experience being an engineer, in what it calls ‘engineerication’. The idea is that if a manager can “down tools” and go on vacation, they can also down tools to spend a week as an IC engineer, too!
As Stripe’s CTO, David leads by example; embedding himself in an engineering team and working end-to-end on a project. “Engineerication” is very helpful for identifying pain points in developer productivity, and frequently leads to improvements.
My observation is that very few companies explicitly encourage this, and without empowerment from above it’s hard to justify doing zero managerial work for a week, in favor of engineering work of not especially high value.
This is an interesting idea to remember if I’m ever in a role that I feel like is getting too far from the code. Go on a ‘staycation’ where I contribute code instead of verbal/prose leadership.