Actually, these scenarios happen in hockey as well. Teams will pick up character guys who have been through it all who are expected to contribute more off ice than on it. Corey Perry is one who comes to mind lately but they're never given a "coach" title. It's entirely possible though that these players may be expected to be a go-between guy between the coach and younger players to help them manage the pressure or to help with encouragement. They're definitely not getting prime minutes though.
I guess that would possibly be the same expectation of a manager who still codes. I can't see them doing anything critical. It's likely picking up some minor bugs or nice-to-have, low priority feature work. I was a manager before and while I didn't reach 15 reports, I was up to 12 at one time. There's just really no focus time that you need for coding. Maybe that's a bit different with AI but even then you still need to find time to make changes and validate. And that's time that takes away from other higher impact things that you could be doing for the team.
There's a reason for this change. As players became elite and specialized by position, the budget for specialization expanded. At the top, teams could afford a distinct role for coaching focus. Since the stakes are really high (the difference between 1-3 points is measured in dozens of millions of dollars of impact due to relegation - a concept that is missing on most US elite sports) it follows specialization drive is sky-high at elite levels.
Thus, soccer player coaches have mostly dissappeared at elite level. But the role is alive and well in the semipro tier.
In roles where there's no binary, extreme outcome from specialization, like in semi pro soccer, or at an ENG role at a random company , it is only natural to have someone wear multiple hats and not specialize.
The payoff to being elite at a valuable skill is enormous. Teams generally benefit more from combining players with distinct, elite strengths than from relying on broad generalists who are not truly elite at anything.
This isn’t always possible if you can’t afford to build a team of specialists, or those specialists don't exist at your level of competition. But if you have the resources and coordination (and in sports, the roster depth and cap space) to cover each specialist’s weaknesses, specialization is pretty much always the stronger composition.
With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.
I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.
not sure if focus should be on athletic sports. Chess is better analogy to software I think.
When building software, if you can state an unambiguous goal and what rules apply you are more than halfway done. It's not uncommon to work on something for a year and discover you have been building the wrong thing. Navigating that ambiguity is where all the value in software engineering is.
In the end, everyone is replaceable. But a king is a bit more difficult to replace, as historically shown.
He won the 2004 Euro Championship, the 2005 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup along with a number of top 4 places over his 15 years as player and/or coach.
But managers should mostly be about two things IMHO:
> Facilitating for ICs.
> COACHING. To elevate ICs and help propagate the desired "culture".
And I don't think they're trying this thing that Coinbase is trying either.
“We at the coding company LovelyBeeBunny should be like the samurai’s of the old, willing to pull our swords to die for emperor…” etc. And it is always riddled with complete misunderstanding of the analogous subject, whether sports, history, or warfare.
When I grew up those were the very definition of "not girly". Our math and comp sci faculties at uni would bend over backwards for any of the girl students.
I would agree though that academics in general were "not manly" and at school at least streams of "academic" or "sporty" existed. For boys anyway.
For the girls (less fascinated by sports) the top sporties were often top academics as well.
History has shown that being academic is always better than sporty (if you gave to pick one.) The "status" given to sports is often an acknowledgment that it's a poor financial path, but we can offer "status" instead.
Yes, sports metaphors can be amusing, but its the winners we're smiling at.