My experience as well. It sounds nice at first, but since it’s tied to org flattening these “player-coaches” end up with 15-20 reports, which is way too many for even a pure manager.

I noticed it was especially bad for on-call and incident response; these managers get pulled in to all the incidents because of their status and supposed involvement, but are not particularly useful in those rooms, adding even more cooks to the already crowded kitchen.

In my experience, managers don't have to be hands-on, but they need to be able to recognize people with talent and unblock them do their jobs, to be able to spot process improvements, including channelling the AI hype to productive outcomes, and to be a steadying influence in a crisis (without adding noise). If a manager doesn't have technical ability, its impossible for them to do those things.

I haven’t had it turn out well with pure managers either, so I’m not sure how much the distinction helps.

Being a great manager requires being good at a whole set of specific skills, and that takes effort and some natural talent.

It can certainly overlap with what makes a great engineer, but not most of the time.

They're still going to have upwards of 5 levels in their hierarchy, so this is obviously for the plebs who are front-line managers, not the several layers above them, as (for example) I'm not sure what a strong player-coach VP of Engineering would exactly look like. I got to Director and quit because it was impossible to be a true contributor at that level or higher. You can see this when you're in critical mode like downtime or a breach; senior management is useless.

For me this is all about team size. It works if you have small teams, maybe max 6 people. But anything above 8-10 this is a total no go. Because management tasks just are not able to be done well at that point.

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Bill Russell, Boston Celtics, NBA national champions 2 years in a row, 67-68, 68-69 (first black head coach in NBA)

Most of the high profile basketball players you can think of do this - obvious ones are Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Lebron James - as I remember it Lebron has even written up plays from time to time during critical games (evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUkQbGQTdQ8, and famously erasing his coach's play: https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/lebron-james-changed-fina...)

There are definitely a tiny handful, which absolutely makes them the exceptions that prove the rule, and a terrible idea for Coinbase or anyone else.

Gianluca Vialli won UEFA Cup Winners' Cup with Chelsea as player-coach in 1998

There's successful actor-directors.

Reggie Dunlop, Charlestown Cheifs, they won the Federal League and it's hard to argue it wasn't all down to his coaching.

George Halas - Chicago Bears

Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool FC, 1985-1990.

Pete Rose baseball?

> This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.

And surely the place you work hired with this in mind. Many places have not, and yet now expect PMs who haven’t coded in years, or in many cases not at all, to contribute to their products’ codebases.