What you give up when moving into engineering management

I loved going deep, solving perf and security problems, and worked across a large number of teams to help them build towards a unified vision.

I made the switch because I saw two major problems that were impacting the ability for engineers in my team to grow and be successful:

1. They weren’t being represented well to the leadership by the current managers.

2. They needed someone who could dedicate more time to career coaching and helping them navigate the politics required to get recognized.

Both of those were the result of having bad managers pretty far up the chain, and we needed someone to step up and refuse to be a “yes man” and actually push back for what the devs needed.

There’s a lot of overlap between solving technical problems and solving people/organizational problems (people and orgs are a different type of puzzle), but you do need a lot more patience, empathy, and tact to solve people problems. Luckily, many of the top engineers at big companies already need to have some level of those since solving most of the large technical problems involves solving people problems.

Now that I’ve successfully solved these problems the teams are more productive and happier, but people have recommended me to move to higher levels of management (which I don’t want). I’m probably going to switch teams now and go back to IC.

I think that anyone who can, should manage for a short period of time but they should have a clear path back to IC if they want it.