Great point. As a senior manager, I definitely am going to spend more time this year doing hands-on work.

Two reasons:

1) You really need to ensure your team is at its efficient best and getting first hand experience as a developer beats nothing else. It also makes the team respect the leader.

2) Career goals. The market is over-indexing on people who are hands-on over people who are employee-first. Why spend time learning skills that are not valuable or respected.

The pitfalls I see sadly are that the opportunities for uplevelling will suffer as you now have a manager who takes on some exciting work for themselves. But to be fair, no-one really appreciated or acknowledged a manager who helped employees uplevel, including the employees themselves.