Why a manager returns to code — episode materials (Series #Leadership)

Code of Leadership #82 is out: on October 1, we spoke with Nikita Belokopytov, who led engineering teams at AutoScout24 and Playrix and now works on applied AI at Bluefish. Why return to development when you already know how to manage people? Nikita gives a practical reason: how can you lead a team if its new tools, and even its problems, are unfamiliar to you?

We discussed:

🔸 How being technically right can get in the way of becoming a manager Nikita recalled telling his manager that he wanted his job, only to be told to ask his colleagues whether they wanted him as their boss. Honest feedback led him to change his communication habits. A daily BeKind reminder appeared in his calendar. 🔸 Why the strongest programmers are not the first to switch to Cursor In Nikita’s experience at Playrix, faster code writing made little difference to people who already wrote quickly and spent most of their time thinking through the problem. Investigating bugs with agents proved more useful once they had a state graph, tools, and an isolated environment. 🔸 What remains of management experience without direct reports Finding a system’s owner, agreeing on a change, removing an obstacle, taking responsibility: all of this helped Nikita in an engineering role. He thinks small autonomous teams may need fewer management layers; this is his forecast, not an established rule for every company. 🔸 Where an agent’s autonomy ends At Bluefish, an agent takes a small Jira task and brings it to a PR. But a human decides whether the task is needed, and an engineer is responsible for changes to the core system. In another experiment, Nikita hit his own review limit of five or six PRs a day; some correction loops between agents reached 60 iterations. That calls for limits on money, time, and repetitions. 🔸 How to get into the code without micromanaging Understanding the system yourself is useful, but you then need to be able to talk to the team. Otherwise, new technical knowledge can easily become new reasons to interfere in someone else’s work.

Episode materials: 📌 Episode page with timestamps 🎬 YouTube, VK Video 🎧 Podster, Yandex Music, Apple Podcasts 📝 Written summary of the conversation

If you returned to development after several years in management, tell us: what did you have to relearn, and which management skill proved unexpectedly useful?

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