Player-coach
The engineering leader who never stopped shipping. A compromise for most of my career; the correct position now.
Also called working manager, hands-on leader
I joined Life Happens as a senior individual contributor and left as CTO. In between, I held four titles and at one point ran engineering and customer success together. I never fully stopped writing code. For most of those years, I was slightly embarrassed by that because the received wisdom said a leader still using the editor had failed to delegate.
I have changed my mind, and not for sentimental reasons.
When producing an implementation was expensive, staying hands-on cost me leverage. An hour in the editor was an hour I did not spend helping five other people. That trade has changed. Now I spend less time producing code and more time judging whether generated code is correct. That judgment gets worse when I stay away from the work. A leader who has not touched the material in three years will struggle to evaluate what the machine produced.
See also Many hats and Verification.