> lost their personal side project time

Yes !

> moved into management roles

Please stop. Except if "coding" is making PoCs.

If it's actual code that runs important stuffs in production: either one cares enough to understand all the ins and outs and going into managements didn't cut them from coding, either they're only pushing what they see as "good enough" code while their team starts polishing resumes and they probably have a better output doing management.

PS: if you only have half an hour for writing something, will you have 3h rolling it back and dealing with the issues produced when stuff goes sideways ? I really don't get the logic.

A common policy I've seen from engineering managers who code (and one I've stuck to myself when I've been in engineering management roles) is to avoid writing code that's on the critical path to shipping.

That's means your team should never be blocked on code that you are responsible for, because as an engineering manager you can rarely commit dedicated coding time to unblocking them.

This still leaves space for quite a few categories of coding:

- prototypes and proof of concepts

- internal "nice to have" tools that increase developer quality of life (I ended up hacking on plenty of these)

- helping debug issues