Developer productivity and being 'in the code'

Here are two interesting programming-related blogposts:

• Dan North writes about the ‘worst’ programmer he knows (via HN); a thoughtful comment on the dangers of individual (instead of e.g. team-based) metrics to measure developer productivity.

• On a similar note, James Stanier discusses the ‘classic question’ of whether software engineering managers should still code. I like his distinction that technical team leads should be in the code, but not necessarily coding (on a day to day basis). From my own experience, doing pair programming and code reviews can give an you at least some insight into the changes of a codebase over time, so this can somewhat compensate for the fact that you’re not writing much code after switching roles.