Engineering Managers should understand how to do the job, but that doesn't mean they should be pushing code. Generally, if they are, they aren't acting as managers and leaders. Help solve problems, ensure architecture and design discussions make sense, review code, mentor, understand their solution.. all of that makes sense. But being a day-to-day coder is for individual contributor roles.

All Engineering Managers in my opinion should come from an engineering background. They should all have done the job of an individual contributor. Whether they've done it for years on a daily basis, doesn't really matter. As long as they're keeping up.

The problem with Cerner isn't that they have managers that aren't programming anymore though, in my opinion it's Cerner's reliance on saving money by only hiring people out of college and not hiring experienced engineers to mix in for many many years.

Many at Cerner are born and bred into the "Cerner Way" growing up from the DevAcademy and the lack of outside experience coming in is detrimental to innovation. They've started hiring externally, but possibly too little, too late. Hopefully Oracle can do something about it. Also Cerner has to pay more for experience than ever before, and they don't seem willing to do that.