You don't delegate everything to a single person, you delegate the parts to the person best fit to do it.
And no, delegating a lot of those tasks doesn't mean that you as a manager have nothing to do. Instead you can spend 20% time doing management tasks and 80% time coding. Each person in the team sharing the "management" burden makes it pretty manageable. (it isn't really management to coordinate with other teams or present to people etc though, no reason you should have a bus factor of 1 for that role)
I literally do this for a living (20+ years now), and have never seen anyone successfully pull this off that was doing what I (or the company) called managing.
I have seen a few people convince themselves this is what they were doing (usually in a line manager/tlm role), while everyone around them was suffering from lack of a proper manager, which their lack of EQ was hiding.
If you somehow found the secret sauce for this, please do share!
Seconding that - managing for ~15 years, with 15 years eng career before that. If you're a manager who spends 80% coding on anything but a small team (<7 people), you're letting your team down.
You might think you're doing a good job, but you really aren't. 20% of your time are only 8 hours. Even if you just spend half an hour with everybody on your team of 8, 4 of those are gone. You haven't spent any time yet coordinating the team as a whole. You haven't spent any time planning. You haven't even answered e-mails yet. Neither did you do any signficant coaching. Nor did you spend time hiring. Or even writing a job description. Or planning compensation. Or helping your two star engineers who are at loggerheads to come to an agreement. Prioritized the backlog? Set up a triage process? Spent way too much time to find out why your junior is super-withdrawn and doesn't ask questions? Set them up with mentorship? How's that design review coming along? Talked UX of the latest "luxe UI" ledge? Got yelled at by them because one of your engineers decided that specs are just suggestions? How's that training program for the new toolkit coming along? Also, the team is kind of nervous because the big project will end in 9 months, and there isn't a new big project yet?
TLM roles are the biggest mistake this industry makes. They work beautifully for 3-5 people, start crumbling for 6-10, soak 100% of your time for 11-14 people just managing while you despair you can't do technical work any more, and become an incredible way to burn out people at 15+ direct reports.
As long as we are throwing out anecdotes, I've been doing this for 3 years and have seen successfully done it on several teams, though they were all at the same company. It absolutely can be done with the right culture.
> Instead you can spend 20% time doing management tasks and 80% time coding.
If you're that good at delegating that you're only using 20% of your time and your team is humming along at a high level... congrats, we've got these other four teams that AREN'T being managed that well, you're now the senior manager in charge of all of them, please get those other managers up to your level too!
And no, delegating a lot of those tasks doesn't mean that you as a manager have nothing to do. Instead you can spend 20% time doing management tasks and 80% time coding. Each person in the team sharing the "management" burden makes it pretty manageable. (it isn't really management to coordinate with other teams or present to people etc though, no reason you should have a bus factor of 1 for that role)