Fear of Becoming a Manager

Three reasons to avoid becoming a manager:

1. Life is short; spend your time at work doing what you enjoy most. For some, truly, management is a better fit, but for many others dealing with metrics, personnel issues, etc. are less than enjoyable.

2. Being a manager often puts pressure on you to be less than honest in reporting to higher-ups and other stakeholders. That can mess with your conscience.

3. When you decide to become a manager you have taken a fork in the road. It leads to somewhere else. Despite what the author says, in my experience the manager drifts away from technical work. He or she tends to become a more or less generic manager who is thus more or less expendable -- and someone who can't really return to their former role even if they wanted to.

>Having any leadership and management experience makes you prepared for more senior roles, such as Engineering Manager, VPoE, or CTO

This is certainly true. The CTO of a food delivery startup called Zomato (this is from India) was initially an intern who worked as a coder and still does quite a bit 12 years later.